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UNIVERSITY
OF FLORIDA
LIBRARIES

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012 with funding from

LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation

http://archive.org/details/williamfaulknerOOfaul

Books by Carvel Collins

The American Sporting Gallery
Literature in the Modern World (With Others)

Editor

Frank Norris: McTeague (Rinehart Edition)

William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches

William Faulkner: The Unvanquished

(Signet Classics Edition)

Erskine Caldwell's Men and Women

Faulkner's University Pieces

William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry

William Faulkner:
Early Prose and Poetry

Compilation and Introduction

Carvel Collins

by. (fcSL-Hfcs

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

An Atlantic Monthly Press Book

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY ■ BOSTON • TORONTO

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRO-
DUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE
PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PAS-
SAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 62-17953

FIRST EDITION

ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN BOOKS

ARE PUBLISHED BY

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

Published simultaneously in Canada
by Little, Brown & Company {Canada) Limited

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

the amiable members of

the Faulkner Seminar,

University of Tokyo, 1961-62,

the compilation of this volume

is warmly dedicated.

Preface

William Faulkner added to his already growing repu-
tation in Japan when he took part in the seminar of
university teachers and students held at Nagano in 1955.
Strongly impressed by him, members of that seminar
have said they doubt they will ever again experience such
an incandescent meeting. And younger Japanese students
have volunteered that they not only admire Faulkner's
fiction but would like to thank him for the address he
wrote "To the Youth of Japan."

Now that Faulkner is again the subject of study by a
seminar of students and teachers in Japan, at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo, it is pleasant to present to them in this
volume some of the work he produced forty years ago
while he himself was part of a university community.

When Faulkner's University of Mississippi poetry,
prose, and drawings first came to the compiler's knowl-
edge, it seemed well not to reprint such early work. His
great, mature books had not yet won him the Nobel Prize;
and though readers were admiring them in increasing
numbers, many critics still held them in low regard. But
now, widely recognized as a major world writer, Faulkner
has such stature that even his earliest works are of in-
terest to many. So it no longer seems helpful to postpone
reprinting such pieces. And it seems well to reprint them
now in the hope of avoiding confusion like that which a
few years ago accompanied the reprinting of Faulkner's
early New Orleans newspaper sketches: During the same

[ ix ]

year in which the compiler came upon and postponed
reprinting these University of Mississippi pieces he came
upon those New Orleans sketches and thought it best also
to postpone reprinting them, for the same reason. But
within a short time other admirers of Faulkner published
eleven of the sixteen New Orleans sketches and later,
after hearing about two more of them, published a second
volume containing just those two sketches. It then seemed
proper to bring out the complete set of sixteen New Or-
leans sketches — and that postponing their reprinting
had clearly not been a service to Faulkner studies after
all. The situation has begun to repeat itself with Faulk-
ner's University of Mississippi pieces: most of them have
been found and several projects for publishing them are
planned by scholars who have not come upon all the
materials reprinted here, already a few of the drawings
have been reproduced, parts of the prose have been
quoted in articles, and an article in an anthology of col-
lege writing has reprinted part of the poems. So, with
close students of Faulkner here and elsewhere becoming
interested in his early writings, it seems well to publish
this little compilation now to honor both Faulkner's ef-
fectiveness at Nagano and the enthusiasm of the members
of the current University of Tokyo seminar.

The many people whose reminiscences, advice, and
general assistance have made possible the gathering of
these and similar materials already know the compiler's
full awareness of the debt he owes them, which he looks
forward to acknowledging in detail elsewhere. Here he
wants to take the opportunity to thank those who sup-

[ x ]

plied the documents, sanctions, and professional services
on which this little compilation immediately depends:
the staffs of The Mississippian newspaper and the Ole
Miss annual for their generosity and cooperation; Mr.
George W. Healey, Jr., and the late Dr. Raymond B.
Zeller, former Editors of The Scream, and Mr. Branham
Hume, former Business Manager of that magazine, for
their support and open-handed offering of drawings and
details of publishing history; Dr. Leon Picon of the
United States Embassy here, who contributed so much
in 1955 to the success of the Nagano seminar, for infor-
mation and advice; Mrs. John Pilkington for her gen-
erous and efficient checking of Mississippi documents;
the staffs of the libraries at the University of Mississippi,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University
of Texas, Harvard University, and Yale University for
assistance of many kinds; the staff of the Microreproduc-
tion Laboratory at M.I.T. for reproductions of illustra-
tions and for skillful photographic salvaging of burned
manuscript pages; the staff of the office which registers
the deeds of Lafayette County, Mississippi, for unflagging
patience during the examination of their file of Oxford
newspapers; as well as the staff of the Oxford Eagle for
assistance far beyond the call of hospitality. And because
it has been a pleasure to assemble this little volume, from
materials brought to Japan as seminar illustrations with
no thought of publishing them as a book, the compiler
wants to thank those Japanese students who urged its
publication out of their admiration for William Faulkner.
Tokyo, 1961

[ xi ]

Preface to the American Edition

These early published works by William Faulkner
having been made available to Japanese readers because
of a seminar offered at the University of Tokyo, it has
been suggested that they be made available to Americans
interested in Faulkner's writing. This edition expands
the Japanese volume by adding photographs and "Por-
trait," the poem which Faulkner published in the New
Orleans Double Dealer during 1922 while he was still
at the University of Mississippi. The appendix added to
this edition contains four works which Faulkner pub-
lished in the same literary magazine in 1925 shortly
after leaving the University for New Orleans: two critical
essays which bear on his University writings, and two
poems — "Dying Gladiator" and "The Faun" — which ne
published before his first novel and which are not in-
cluded among the poems he later collected in A Green
Bough. Though these two essays and three poems from
the Double Dealer were among the items reprinted in
1932 by Paul Romaine in his Salmagundi, that volume is
unfortunately out of print. The compiler and the pub-
lishers want to express their gratitude to Mrs. Lillian
Friend Marcus, Managing Editor of the Double Dealer,
for her permission to reprint here these additional works
of early prose and poetry by William Faulkner.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962

[ xiii ]

Contents

Preface

Preface to the American Edition

xiii

Faulkner at the University of Mississippi

L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune

Cathay

Landing in Luck

Sapphics

After Fifty Years

Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues

Naiads' Song

Fantoches

Clair de Lune

Streets

A Poplar

A Clymene

Study

Alma Mater

To a Co-ed

Books and Things: In April Once by W. A. Percy

Books and Things: Turns and Movies

by Conrad Aiken

Co-education at Ole Miss

Nocturne

Books and Things: Aria da Capo by

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[ XV ]

Books and Things: American Drama: Eugene O'Neill 86

The Hill

Books and Things: American Drama: Inhibitions

Portrait

Books and Things: Joseph Hergesheimer

101

Appendix

On Criticism

109

Dying Gladiator

113

Verse Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage

114

The Faun

119

Notes on the Text

123

[xvi ]

William Faulkner:
Early Prose and Poetry

Faulkner at
the University of Mississippi

William Faulkner drew a picture for the 1916-1917
annual of the University of Mississippi. It began a series
of contributions he was to make during the next eight
years to that annual, to the University newspaper, and to
a University humor magazine. By 1925 these three publi-
cations had brought out at least sixteen more of his draw-
ings, sixteen of his poems, his first published short story
and prose sketch, and six of his reviews and literary
articles — the artistic explorations of a young man who
would become the best novelist his country has pro-
duced in this century.

Faulkner's father, an officer in the administration of
the University of Mississippi, which adjoins the town of
Oxford, had a house on its campus, in which William
Faulkner lived for much of the period under discussion
here. In such close physical association with the Uni-
versity he found its publications open to him not only
during the time he was enrolled as a student but earlier
when he worked at a bank and later when he ran the
University Post Office.

[ 3 ]

A former student of that era has kindly volunteered
his memory that Faulkner wrote in 1916 for the Uni-
versity's newspaper two or three imitation "Letters of a
Japanese School Boy" which were his earliest publica-
tions. A series of such letters did appear; but at its con-
clusion the newspaper identified its author as another
man, and there seems to be little possibility of attributing
individual letters from that series to Faulkner. It seems
equally impossible to attribute to him with any certainty
another, shorter series of imitation letters of the same
period, though he may have written some of them. Even
high school publications as yet unavailable may contain
written juvenilia or drawings similar to ten of Faulkner's
pen-and-ink school sketches which survive from 1913.
But his first published work which this investigation has
been able to identify is the signed drawing for the 1916-
1917 Ole Miss annual.

It was followed the next year by two signed drawings
in the 1917-1918 Ole Miss, one of them for the same
"Social Activities" page his first had decorated, the other
to decorate a page listing the members of a dancing
group. Faulkner presumably supplied the staff of Ole
Miss with these drawings before April 10, 1918; for on
that day he began work as a ledger clerk at an armament
company in Connecticut. Signing up with the Royal Fly-
ing Corps, and then resigning from his job as clerk on
June 15, 1918, he made a brief trip home to visit his
family before leaving Mississippi on July 8, 1918, for
Toronto, Canada, to begin training as a pilot. Four
months later came the Armistice. When the British re-

[ 4 ]

William Faulkner in 1918, as a Cadet in the
Royal Flying Corps, Training in Canada

[ 5 ]

leased him from training the following month, he returned
from Canada to Mississippi.

That spring and summer — according to Phil Stone,
a close associate of those days — Faulkner did even
more reading than usual and wrote much of the poetry
he would revise for The Marble Faun of five years later.
On August 6, 1919, The New Republic printed his poem
"L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," his first piece of writing
known to have been published and his first published
draft on the Symbolist poets from whom he would draw
so much. At summer's end, on September 19, 1919, he
registered as a student at the University of Mississippi,
enrolling in French, Spanish, and the sophomore survey
of English literature.

His first contributions to the University's newspaper,
The Mississippian, were a slightly revised version of
"L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" in October and, on Novem-
ber 12, 1919, the poem "Cathay." "Cathay" illustrates
some of the uncertainties which accompany reprinting
these pieces: Lines of the poem in The Mississippian
seem to have been disturbed by faulty typesetting, but
perfect guidance for emendation is not to be found in the
other three available versions. The most accessible of the
three is a typescript William Faulkner loaned to the
Princeton University Library for its exhibition of 1957,
which now can be seen as Plate 3 among the illustrations
in James B. Meriwether's excellent book The Literary
Career of William Faulkner (Princeton, 1961). It differs
from the printed version at points where The Mississip-

[ 6 ]

pian seems not to have made typographical errors. The
other two versions came to light about a decade after a
1941 fire had destroyed a house containing early Faulk-
ner papers — when I was able, with the kind consent
and help of the owners, to separate from the debris, dry
out, and read more than four hundred and seventy pages,
including a damaged holograph version of this poem
dated 1920 and an undated, damaged typescript of it.
They differ at several points not only from the version
in The Mississippian but from the version Mr. Faulk-
ner loaned to Princeton. These documents differ be-
cause William Faulkner revised and improved his early
poems for several years, printing some of them as late
as 1933, after he not only had become a novelist but
had created that fictional masterpiece, The Sound and
the Fury.

The Mississippian launched Faulkner as an author of
fiction two weeks after it had printed his poem "Cathay,"
when it brought out on November 26, 1919, the first
story he is known to have published, titled "Landing in
Luck" and set at a military training aerodrome in
Canada.

In the same issue the newspaper published another
of his poems, "Sapphics," and in subsequent issues during
the rest of that 1919-1920 academic year published ten
more. Most of them were more sophisticated than the
verse other students wrote for the newspaper, and the
discrepancy created opposition to Faulkner's work. On
February 4, 1920, the week after he published "Une

[ 7 ]

Ballade des Femmes Perdues," a fellow student parodied
it. After Faulkner published "Naiads' Song" and "Fan-
toches," which the paper mis-set as "Fantouches," the
parodist struck again, with "Whotouches," signed "J."
As an artist partly apprenticed to the Symbolists, Faulk-
ner already must have learned from them to expect hos-
tility of this sort; and one would like to imagine that, while
he was learning to adapt to his own circumstances and
skills some of the aesthetic practice and theory of the
authors of "L'Apres-midi dun Faune" and "Fantoches,"
Faulkner was also learning from les poetes maudits
to cherish more and more the natural independence and
self-containment within which he has recorded his aes-
thetic perceptions with remarkable indifference to much
neglect and hostility during long early years, great adula-
tion during recent years, and considerable misunder-
standing throughout.

With his "Fantoches," on February 25, 1920, Faulk-
ner began the publication of a group of four poems which
he specifically connected with their source, in this case
the work of Paul Verlaine. "Clair de Lune," the second
of this group of four — all of them using Verlaine's
titles — appeared on March 3, 1920, and the third,
"Streets," on March 17. Faulkner's adaptation of Ver-
laine's "Streets" was not his only contribution to that
issue of The Mississippian; in addition to a poem called
"A Poplar" he published one of the very few responses
he has ever made to the reactions of his readers, a reply
to the student "J" who had parodied two of his earlier
poems. Appearing under the title "The Ivory Tower,"

[ 8 ]

this reply said (in part and with the obvious typographical
errors removed):

Ben Jonson, himself a strong advocate of Mirth, has said
that laughter is one of our most valuable possessions. Which
is quite true: Imagine what this world would be without it.
Yet mirth requires two things: humor and a sense of humor.
I flatter myself that I possess the latter; but — and I am sure
I am unprejudiced — my unknown "affinity" has notably
failed in producing the former. I will state further, that in
his present vein he will never achieve it without asking —
and accepting — collaboration. It were not sufficient that I
boldly make this statement lest the reader justifiably cry
"Wolf!"; yet the matter is scarcely worth exhausting either
my vocabulary or the reader's patience, so I shall be as brief
as possible.

(1.) The first poem submitted by him was stupid, for my
own poem was stupid. One sees at a glance then, the utter
valuelessness of an imitation of an imitation. (2.) This though,
was not the only way in which the poet sinned. The most de-
plorable thing was his meaningless and unnecessary parading
of his doubtless extensive knowledge of the Latin language.
To my mind there is nothing as vulgar as a conscious mingling
of two languages — unless, of course, the mingling gives
shades and tones that the work would not otherwise possess.
Whatever tones and shades his poem possessed could have, it
seems to me, been drawn in single language (its clarity could
have been enhanced, in all probability, by adhering to some
simple language such as an early Aztec dialect). This though,
is beside the point.

The second poem is not worthy of note, closely resembling
the first in being a vulgarly stupid agglomeration of words.
... if this be humor, then I have lost my sense of it; unless
humor is, like evil, in the eye of the beholder.

[ 9 ]

However, if he has, by any chance, gained the effect for
which he has so palpably striven, the answer is, of course,
simply de gustibus.

William Falkner.

Faulkner, in signing this response, followed the form
of his family name which his father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather used, as he did in signing most of his
University of Mississippi pieces which are reprinted here.
Discussions of who put the "u" in William Faulkner's
name rival in number the renditions of that great musical
question about the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder.
Insignificant as the matter is, the continual confusion
concerning it illustrates the immaturity of much writing
about Faulkner. The customary — and wrong — ex-
planation of the change in spelling is one of the small
counterfeit coins which too many workers in the Faulk-
ner industry have passed among themselves from the
beginning to the present. For example, the most recent
of the American books of Faulkner criticism, Frederick
J. Hoffman, William Faulkner (New York, 1961), re-
ferring to the year 1924 in its "Chronology," says, "First
book published: The Marble Faun, a book of poems,
published by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. Because of
printer's error, a "u" added to Faulkner's name, which
he has retained." That is as untrue as an even less inter-
esting piece of this minor coinage which once again re-
appears in another recent, small book, Michael Millgate,
William Faulkner (Edinburgh, 1961): that in the First
World War, as Millgate puts it, Faulkner "managed to
join the Canadian Flying Corps," which must have taken

[ 10 ]

considerable managing because in that war Canada had
no air force. These bits of biographical counterfeit, of
course, have no importance whatever. But when such
tertiary books, drawing them from dubious secondary
sources, offer them again and again, they are an obvious
reminder of the existence of a more subtle, much more
significant false coinage of critical judgment which such
books also circulate. The "u" in Faulkner's name began
to appear intermittently some years before the publication
of The Marble Faun in 1 924 by printers to whose error
the spelling is continually attributed. According to the
staff of the armament company for which Faulkner
worked in Connecticut from April into June of 1918,
his name appears in their records of that year's employees
as "William Faulkner." His first known published literary
work signed "Faulkner" is his first known published
literary work: "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," New Re-
public, 1919. To reduce the possibility that writers on
Faulkner will attribute that insertion of the "u" — more
than five years before the publication of The Marble
Faun — to an error by the New Republic printers, it may
be well to mention other early appearances of "Faulk-
ner." Among the burned sheets of his early writings
salvaged some years ago was a small, badly damaged,
beautifully produced booklet of poems, hand-lettered
as a gift to a friend, titled The Lilacs, dated January 1,
1920, and bearing, carefully lettered by its author, the
name "W. Faulkner." One of the two copies I have read
of the booklet titled Marionettes, which Faulkner "pub-
lished" himself in pen-and-ink and circulated to a few

[ 11 ]

William Faulkner in the Uniform
of the British Air Force

[ 12 ]

friends, bears the date "1920" and the name "W. Faulk-
ner," both in Faulkner's characteristic lettering. In ad-
dition to his booklet The Lilacs, other items among the
fire-damaged papers of his University of Mississippi years
which relate to this little matter are typescripts of poems
by "William Faulkner" which bear-dates earlier than that
of The Marble Faun. So, apparently, this is one puz-
zling spelling printers did not cause, and the answer to
the question Who Put the "u" in William Faulkner's
Name? is William Falkner.

Whatever way he was spelling his family name, Faulk-
ner's importing to the Mississippi campus not only the
works of French Symbolists but a walking stick; his
detached air of unemployment which masked his dedica-
tion to the labor of writing, which has produced more
than twenty-five books and was already producing the
formative published and unpublished pieces of those
early years; and his awareness, common to uncommon
genius, that he would one day become a first-rate artist
— all these had led some of the college students to give
him the nickname "Count," which the student "J" used
in a letter printed in The Mississippian for March 24,
1920. This is apparently the first published commentary
on Faulkner's works — and one more similar in tone
to many of the commentaries on Faulkner published be-
fore the Second World War than it is pleasant to recol-
lect:

I feel it my duty to answer an article that appeared in
the last issue of your very estimable paper. This article seems
to have been written by a peculiar person who calls himself

[ 13 ]

William Falkner and who from all accounts undoubtedly re-
sides in the remote village of Oxford, Miss. He says he "flat-
ters" himself that he possesses a sense of humor. I say he flat-
ters himself if he says he possesses anything. "I boldly make
this statement lest the Editor justifiably cry 'Bull.' " I shall, of
course, make this article very brief, desiring to conserve the
valuable space in this paper and also my own exhaustible
energy for some more serious subject.

I feel, Mr. Editor, like kicking myself three successive
times, each a trifle severer than the former. I tried so hard to
find what the Count was "driving at," and only that he, him-
self, admits his work was "stupid." Modesty forbids me
using a stronger epithet than "stupid."

I have written the parodies to give Count's poems a mean-
ing; and behold! how little he appreciates my humble efforts.

But permit me to wander. Mr. Editor, wouldn't this be a
fine University if all of us were to wear sailor collars, monkey
hats, and brilliant pantaloons; if we would 'mose' along the
street by the aid of a walking prop; and, ye gods forbid, if we
should while away our time singing of lascivious knees, smil-
ing lute strings, and voluptuous toes? Wouldn't that be just
too grand?

Since Count used a quotation, allow me the same liberty.
I use the words of Lord Byron, "He brays, the Laureate of
the long-eared kind."

And now, allow me to apologize for wasting your valuable
time on such a subject, and permit me to remain,

Your humble servant,

— J.

Two weeks later the controversy in The Mississippian
over Faulkner's poetry had not abated, for the paper
carried a brief note by Faulkner wondering of "J" "where
did he learn English construction?" and a lengthy de-

[ 14 ]

fense of Faulkner by someone signing himself "F," a new
participant in the controversy who seems now to our
hindsight pleasantly perceptive:

I feel it my duty to answer an article that appeared in the
last issue of your very estimable paper. This article seems to
have been written by a peculiar person who signs himself
"J" . . .

I think some gentle reader should undertake to defend
Count in this controversy. Of all the by-products of nature,
a poet is the least able to protect himself in such a di-
lemma. . . .

It is not intended to infer that Count could not answer this
article as well as anyone else. However, he is probably now,
in his fancy, with the keen discernment of a poetic eye,
measuring the dimple on the knee of some fairy, figuratively
speaking, so that he can convey to our thirsting souls in
rhythmic verse its full significance. Rather than have him
interrupted in this, I burden my weak shoulders with the task,
and for once in my life perhaps place nobility under obliga-
tions to me.

"J" 's following Count's passionate outbursts with some of
his Possum Hollow poetry adds about as much dignity and
calm to the majestic pose and sweep of Count's literary
course as a tomato can tied to a poodle's tail. . . .

The only excuse he has for this propensity to pester the
poets seems to be that he is giving them meaning. Ha! well
might one use a raindrop to measure the ocean's depth,
choose the movement of a turtle to explain the eagle's flight,
or listen to the screech of the "J" bird to interpret the love
notes of a dove.

Poets don't sprout in every garden of learning, and how
can they grow and bloom into a genius when they are con-
tinually surrounded by bitterweeds. . . .

[ 15 ]

This defense of Faulkner's poetry ended the contro-
versy with "J" except for a weak letter which "J" pub-
lished almost a month later, on May 5, saying he had
delayed his reply on the assumption that Faulkner's de-
fender "had been shipped to Jackson for treatment" in the
state insane asylum. The Mississippian published only two
more parodies of Faulkner's poetry, apparently by new
performers: in the same issue which contained the letter
from "F," a parody of Faulkner's "Clair de Lune," titled
"Cane de Looney"; and during the next month, on May
12, a parody of his "Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues,"
titled "Une Ballade d'une Vache Perdue," execrably writ-
ten but briefly arresting because of its crude presentation
of a motif which Faulkner himself would use for humor
in a piece first published in French translation during
1943 as "L'Apres-midi d'une Vache" and which he
would use for thematic point, parody, and pathos as well
as humor in The Hamlet when the idiot wanders with his
cow. Though the parodies ended and though Faulkner
received visible support of his writing — in addition to
that in the letter by "F" — when he won a prize for the
best literary work in the 1920 Mississippian, a fellow
student and good friend recalls that Faulkner's departure
from campus poetic convention led to his being black-
balled for membership in a literary society — a vote
amusing to Faulkner's friend, and others.

On April 14 The Mississippian published "A Cly-
mene," the last of the four poems which Faulkner as-
cribed to Verlaine. With "Study," on April 21, 1920, and
"Alma Mater," on May 12, The Mississippian concluded

[ 16 ]

its publication of works by Faulkner during his first year
as a student. But his University productions of that year
were not over: the 1919-1920 Ole Miss in its end-of-year
appearance contained six of his pieces, five of them
drawings. Faulkner had served during the college year
as one of the art editors on the staff under the writer
Louis Cochran, who was then a student and the annual's
editor in chief. In addition to Faulkner's drawings, the
annual also contained his poem "To a Co-ed," which
Cochran had invited him to contribute — and which has
led Cochran to joke about having been the first publisher
to get Faulkner's writing into a book.

The next autumn, when Faulkner again enrolled at
the University, he joined at once in formally founding the
Marionettes as the University's official dramatic society.
Faulkner's friend Ben Wasson, whose work later appeared
on Broadway, was the first president; and Faulkner was
in charge of staging the plays, such as The Arrival of
Kitty, performed the next January. Members of the Mar-
ionettes recall that several of them, including Faulkner,
had enjoyed producing plays for a year or more before
officially connecting their group with the University, and
Faulkner was to continue with the society for some
years beyond his semesters as a student, being an honor-
ary member until 1925.

Early in his association with the Marionettes, Faulkner
wrote a one-act play titled Marionettes, which he "pub-
lished" for friends as a few attractive hand-lettered book-
lets. The first page of the text of one copy and its facing
drawing have been made generally accessible as Figure 1

[ 17 ]

of the illustrations in James B. Meriwether, The Literary
Career of William Faulkner. Another copy of the book-
let contains fifty-three pages of hand-lettering and nine
pages of line drawings. Some of the play's motifs come
from other Faulkner works of that time — among them
"A Poplar" and "Study" in The Mississippian as well as
preliminary versions of the poetry he would later pub-
lish as The Marble Faun — and from the works of other
writers, including Verlaine and Amy Lowell, the motif
of a well-groomed woman walking the formal paths of
her garden presumably owing something to Miss Lowell's
"Patterns." Despite great differences of intention and
surface, this play introduces some elements which appear
in at least two other prose works Faulkner wrote during
the 'twenties: the story of Sir Galwyn in the unpublished
allegorical booklet titled Mayday and Quentin Compson's
section of The Sound and the Fury. Among the characters
of this play, though it is much farther removed than
Mayday from Quentin's monologue, are Pierrot, the
Shade of Pierrot, Marietta, and the Spirit of Autumn,
this last figure presenting the significance of mortality as
do the man named Time in Mayday and Quentin's father
in The Sound and the Fury. The suggestion that the
troubled Pierrot may have drowned in a river looks ahead
to the drownings which end the lives of both Sir Galwyn
and Quentin Compson.

During his period at the University of Mississippi, and
probably rather early in it, Faulkner, according to a
friend, wrote a brief, untitled, one-act play which appar-
ently survived in only one copy. It shows how Ruth, an

[ 18 1

emancipated girl of the prohibition era, ends her en-
gagement to the more worldly Francis and becomes en-
gaged to pusillanimous Jim, who, though giving in to
Ruth on all counts, wins her because, according to her,
he is so dominating. One interested in identifying un-
signed, unpublished works by Faulkner might like to
feel at least the slightest of similarities between the quiet
opening remark of this play and the noisy opening sen-
tence of Jason's monologue in The Sound and the Fury
as well as between the action of this play and the central
motif of one of Faulkner's unpublished, fire-damaged,
signed poems; but nothing whatever in the wording and
plot of the play proves that it is by Faulkner.

Before two months of the autumn semester of his
second year had passed, Faulkner withdrew from en-
rollment in the University, on November 5, 1920, and
never again registered as a student! But this by no means
severed his connection with the University's publications.
Five days after he abandoned formal schooling The Mis-
sissippian brought out the first of a series of his literary
articles: a review of a volume of W. A. Percy's poetry in
which Faulkner made the interesting remark that Percy
" — like alas! how many of us — suffered the misfortune
of having been born out of his time." The second in this
series of articles discussed Conrad Aiken, whose poetry
Faulkner respected and frequently quoted admiringly to
his University of Mississippi friends, as he did the poetry
of James Joyce, a volume of which he often carried
about the campus.

In May, 1921, The Mississippian, which retained

[ 19 ]

Faulkner's name on its staff roll as one of the "Contrib-
uting Editors" despite his having resigned as a student,
published his poem "Co-Education at Ole Miss." And at
the end of that 1920-1921 academic year the Ole Miss
annual, which also had retained Faulkner's name on its
staff roll, as one of its art editors, published four of his
drawings and his unsigned poem "Nocturne" with its
decorative border, featuring it as a two-page spread which
was impressive in spite of the reversal of the sequence of
the plates — presumably a printers' error.

Faulkner left Oxford during this period, staying for a
time in New York City. One of his friends there was the
writer Stark Young, a native of Mississippi whom he had
known at Oxford. Young did more than offer Faulkner
a temporary base in this unsettled period following col-
lege; for, as he has helpfully written in a letter, he was
able to introduce Faulkner to Elizabeth Prall, "in whose
house I had a room, the room Bill shared for a time."
Later Elizabeth Prall, by then the wife of Sherwood
Anderson, was to introduce Faulkner to her husband in
New Orleans to begin an association which Faulkner has
since described as one he remembers with great pleasure.

But before his important sojourn in New Orleans,
Faulkner resumed for three years his association with
the University of Mississippi. The University newspaper
for Friday, December 9, 1921, in its "Locals" column
reported: "William Falkner, former Ole Miss student,
who has been in New York City for some time studying
art, has returned to the University to take the temporary
postmastership at the University post office." And an-

[ 20 ]

other article in the same issue, noting that the "exam-
ination for the position was held Saturday in Oxford" for
Faulkner and two other contestants, wished "the best
man success." Faulkner won the position, and by March,
1922, his recommendation to become permanent post-
master reached the United States Senate for confirmation,
which it received.

The month after he began work in the University's
post office, Faulkner began contributing again to The
Mississippian, with a review of Edna St. Vincent Millay's
Aria da Capo, on January 13, 1922, and an article prais-
ing Eugene O'Neill, on February 3, 1922, both of them
initialed "W.F."

Though he had published his first piece of fiction,
"Landing in Luck," almost as soon as he had enrolled as a
student, Faulkner had published no other piece of fiction
in the more than two years that had passed when on
March 10, 1922, The Mississippian printed a prose
sketch, "The Hill," which it credited merely to "W.F."
The sketch is so closely related to a poem by Faulkner —
the tenth in A Green Bough — that there is no problem
about ascription; but for confirmation that he wrote this
and the four other Mississippian pieces signed "W.F." I
am indebted to a former member of the newspaper's staff.
The week following the appearance of this sketch The
Mississippian printed the first part of an article by Faulk-
ner called "American Drama: Inhibitions," which it com-
pleted in the next week's issue. That spring the Ole Miss
annual for 1922 contained, on the page of the French
Club, its last drawing by Faulkner, ending an association

[ 21 ]

which had begun five years before when the annual had
published the drawing which is Faulkner's first publica-
tion this investigation has been able to discover.

But by this time Faulkner was, of course, not so much
withdrawing his work from the University of Mississippi's
amateur publications and their relatively small circle of
readers as he was moving toward professional publica-
tion for the larger audience which now, forty years later,
is world-wide. When the Ole Miss annual was printing
this last of its drawings by Faulkner, the first of his seven
contributions to the Double Dealer — the poem titled
"Portrait" — appeared in the June, 1922, issue of that
national "little magazine," which was published at New
Orleans, where Faulkner was later to turn to fiction.

Though Faulkner had brought out his last University
poem in the spring of 1921, his concern with poetry was
to continue for some years: He dated a few unpublished
poems during his New Orleans months in 1925 and had
published four in the Double Dealer by the time he left
New Orleans for Europe on July 7, 1925. Other unpub-
lished poems are dated on that European trip. In 1926,
the period immediately following his return, he dated
more poems, from Pascagoula, Mississippi. After he had
published major novels he still showed his concern with
poetry by publishing during 1932 several poems in an
issue of Contempo which featured his work, and by bring-
ing out in 1932 and 1933 This Earth and A Green
Bough, volumes which included revisions of poems he
had written at the University of Mississippi.

In December, 1922, the University newspaper pub-

[ 22 ]

lished its last essay by Faulkner, a review article center-
ing on three novels by Joseph Hergesheimer. Interestingly
— though probably it is only coincidence — the subjects
of his previous pieces of literary criticism in The Missis-
sippian had been either poetry or drama while he was de-
voting his time to writing poems and plays, but now as
he moved a little closer in time to the novelist he was to
become, this final Mississippian review was Faulkner's
only contribution to that newspaper about an author of
fiction.

Possibly Faulkner made one more contribution to The
Mississippian after this review of Hergesheimer. At the
start of the last year of his postmastership, on January 1 1 ,
1924, the paper carried a large, humorous "advertise-
ment" for a Bluebird Insurance Company which was
dedicated to the happiness of students because it would
protect them in their college courses by insuring them
"against professors and other failures." This advertise-
ment and those which followed it purported to have been
purchased by a company composed of three men: a
student who had just returned from England where he
had been at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; one of Faulk-
ner's post office assistants, who later would become post-
master when Faulkner resigned; and Faulkner. Each was
listed as a "president" of the company.

The published accounts of Faulkner's life which men-
tion the Bluebird Insurance Company seem to have as-
sumed without question that Faulkner invented and de-
veloped this joke. One cannot with assurance label that
interpretation wrong, but there is the possibility that much

[ 23 ]

— or all? — of this series of advertisements originated in
the office of The Mississippian and that Faulkner and,
perhaps, the other two men were drafted as "presidents"
without their consent or knowledge. Linking the three
men together as founders of the company may have
struck the newspaper's staff as funny: When the returned
Rhodes Scholar, whom a Mississippian news article of
just this time called "the famous and inimitable," gave a
talk to the Latin Club of the University about life at Ox-
ford, England, the reporter described the talk rather dis-
respectfully, saying it had revealed that at Oxford Uni-
versity "luncheon was served in one's room and one only
had to take one's dinner, doncher know, with the jolly
rabble" and that there one " — can you believe it? — lets
afternoon tea interfere with a hotly contested cricket
match." The post office assistant had appeared — pleas-
antly enough — in a series of Mississippian columns
which made fun of campus figures and also, along with
Faulkner and others of the post office force, in an
illustrated half page of the humor section of the 1922
Ole Miss which named the post office the "Postgraduate
Club" with "Hours: 11:20 to 12:20 every Wednesday,"
"Motto: Never put the mail up on time," and "Aim:
Develop postmasters out of fifty students every year."
Faulkner's name had appeared on the formal roll of
the University's "Freshman Literary Class" in the
1919-1920 Ole Miss as "Falkner, Count William," and
he had been listed by the humor section of the Ole
Miss for 1923 as^ "Hardest Worker — Count Falkner"
in the list of "Superlative Election" results which named

[ 24 ]

WE INSURE YOU!

MAKE OLE MISS A WINTER RESORT!

Insure yourself against professors and other failures. Let your failures pay
your way through college. If the professors don't appreciate your brains,
the co-eds will your money. Laugh at pop-writtens — they mean less pop-
written checks.

Girls, TKink of Your Feet!

Our Foot-Ease Dancing Policy for ladies beats Blue-Jay in stopping that
after-dance pain. Take out one of our famous policies and then write
your A. & M. friends to come over.

Boys, Why Worry?

If sweetie stands you up, let us be the one to worry. Our Broken-Hearted
Policy for young men will make you laugh when sheik m?kes a date
with her !

There was once a man who went hunting. When he was a long ways from
home it began to rain very, very hard. Seeing no other shelter, the man
crawled into a hollow log and went to sleep. When he awoke the log
had swollen so that he could not get out. The man felt that his last days
had come. At once he began to realize he had wasted most of his life
and had failed to take out that policy when the BLUEBIRD salesman
called the day before. This made him feel so small that he crawled right
out of the little end of the log. Moral : Let the BLUEBIRD help you out
of tight places.

THE BLUEBIRD INSURANCE CO.

"We Take Anything"

James Bell, Jr., President. William Falkner, President

Louis Jigcetts, President

Bell-Falkner-Jicgetts, Unlimited, Underwriters

[ 25 }

such other involuntary electoral victors as "Most Popu-
lar Professor" and "Biggest Grouch," and through the
years he had appeared in the "Hayseed Letters" columns
of The Mississippian in which the correspondence be-
tween an imaginary bumpkin at college and his father
back on the farm at Possum Trot gave the authors of the
column opportunities to make jokes about students and
faculty. As one example, in a September 21, 1920, letter
the son wrote home: "Wei here I am back again at the
best schule in the world. Me and Blind Jim [an afflicted
Negro about the campus whom the students sometimes
adopted as a class officer or unofficial member of the
University's administration], T. J. Tubb and Hannibal,
Bill Falkner and Paul Rogers is all here now so school
can comminct whenever it wants to." Though the "presi-
dent" of the Bluebird Insurance Company who had been
a Rhodes Scholar had also been one of the two authors of
those "Hayseed Letters" with their burlesquing of stu-
dents and faculty, and though the "president" who was
an assistant at the post office was listed with the Rhodes
Scholar among the "Contributors to This Issue" of The
Mississippian which carried the first Bluebird advertise-
ment, it seems doubtful that the remaining "president,"
William Faulkner, would strongly have favored publish-
ing among the defenses of the Company in its advertise-
ment of February 15 such an item as this: "It is a gross
injustice to say that President Falkner has permanently
retired in the Post Office. He merely takes temporary
naps — during business hours." Faulkner, whose sense of
humor has clearly demonstrated that it includes himself,

[ 26 ]

may have taken part in this series of advertisements,
which did not end until many months later with a full-
page notice in the Ole Miss annual; but until firmer evi-
dence appears either way, admirers of his fiction should
be kindly allowed at least to assume that if Faulkner did
voluntarily help work up these Bluebird notices he did
not write the more flat-footed parts of them, did not favor
stretching the joke over such a long time, and had nothing
whatever to do with the news article in the February 15
Mississippian which announced that the next day the
campus would start "The Bluebird Game," in which
"some popular young man," secretly the Bluebird, would
"carry a striped letter" to deliver "to the first coed" who
happened to ask whether he was the Bluebird. "The for-
tunate young lady" would receive a ticket to the movies
and a Bluebird insurance policy. The first game was to be
"solely for the coeds. The next solely for the eds." "Isn't
a ticket to the show worth asking the question? Try it.
You'll find it fun. Play the Bluebird game."

Whatever Faulkner's relationship to the Bluebird In-
surance Company hoax, he had many pleasures in these
years in addition to his writing. He kept up his practice of
taking long walks into the countryside, often covering
twelve or fifteen miles with Phil Stone on a Sunday, and
sometimes going off on foot for jaunts lasting several
days. He and his friends enjoyed driving about in his open
white car, which was named, at least by some of the
friends, "Snowflake," and must have offered a pleasant,
and notable, variation in a time still affected by Henry
Ford's legendary order to give them any color they want

[ 27 ]

just so it's black. Faulkner also played golf frequently at
the University — so competently that near the time of his
resignation as postmaster he took part in an exhibition
match with two touring professionals, one from Wiscon-
sin and one from Indiana, and turned in the best score.
When the managers of the exhibition passed a hat in the
audience to collect money for the players to divide among
themselves, Faulkner elected to remain, in golf, an ama-
teur.

Always an athlete, an outdoorsman, and a man effec-
tively concerned for the welfare of the young, Faulkner
served during part of this period as scoutmaster of the
Oxford Boy Scout troop. Former members recall with
pleasure and admiration that at meetings, on day-long
outings, and during periods in camp, such as one in late
August, 1924, at a small lake northwest of Oxford, Wil-
liam Faulkner created an unusually pleasant atmosphere,
so that in the complete absence of nervous, shouted adult
discipline, the boys maintained sense and order and had
a fine time. One former youth of Oxford, now an im-
portant scholar, recalls the interest Faulkner was able to
give a game in which the problem was to creep unde-
tected through the woods toward a central player, a game
Faulkner introduced and the boys of Oxford much en-
joyed. Faulkner himself enjoyed this association and must
have disliked having to end it, for he obviously was a
first-rate scoutmaster.

As postmaster in these years, however, his performance
apparently left something to be desired. He is said by
friends to have accepted the job with the greatest reluc-

[ 28 ]

tance. And to readers of today there is something prepos-
terous about the future author of The Sound and the Fury
and Go Down, Moses making a living sorting other peo-
ple's Christmas cards. By September 2, 1924, a U.S. Post
Office inspector with headquarters in Corinth, Missis-
sippi, had written Faulkner a letter detailing patrons'
complaints about undelivered letters and packages, his
reading a great deal instead of maintaining ardent at-
tendance at the stamp window, and his having in the
process of publication a book which some patrons
claimed was written at the post office. The inspector has
since recalled that Faulkner said he was "glad the Post
Office sent someone who had a sense of humor and
realized what a 'hell of a job' " it was. At the end of
October, 1924, after almost three years at the post office,
Faulkner resigned and the next day in a moving letter to
a friend reported that it was pleasant to be completely
free again to write and that he intended never again to be
so trapped no matter what the consequences. A few
weeks later, on December 26, 1924, when The Marble
Faun had been published, Faulkner gave a copy to the
Post Office inspector, inscribed to him as one "to whose
friendship I owe extrication from a very unpleasant situ-
ation."

About mid-October Faulkner may have begun plan-
ning his departure from the post office, from the Univer-
sity, and from Mississippi. If so, his poem titled "Missis-
sippi Hills: My Epitaph," which survives in manuscripts
dated October 17, 1924, and was much revised later for
the booklet published as This Earth and for A Green

[ 30 ]

Bough, has additional poignance. In mid-December,
1924, his first book, The Marble Faun, was published in
Boston, a volume of poems dedicated to the poet's
mother; with a preface dated "September 23, 1924"
written by Phil Stone, who had been instrumental in ar-
ranging for its publication; and bearing at its end, as a
date line for the composition of the poems, "April, May,
June, 1 91 9." Some of Stone's prefatory — and prophetic
— comments about the poetry in The Marble Faun also
apply to many of Faulkner's early poems which are being
reprinted here:

They are the poems of youth. . . . They belong inevitably
to that period of uncertainty and illusion. . . . They also
have the defects of youth — youth's impatience, unsophisti-
cation and immaturity. They have youth's sheer joy . . .
and youth's sudden, vague, unreasoned sadness over nothing
at all. ... I think these poems show promise. They have
an unusual feeling for words and the music of words, a love
of soft vowels, an instinct for color and rhythm, and — at
times — a hint of coming muscularity of wrist ... a man
who has real talent will grow, will leave these things behind,
will finally bring forth a flower that could have grown in no
garden but his own.

Immediately after the publication of The Marble Faun,
the New Orleans Times-Picayune, under the headline,
"Author Goes to Europe," and under the date line, "Uni-
versity, Miss., Dec. 16," announced:

William Falkner, author of "The Marble Faun," which he
recently received from his New York publisher, is preparing
to leave the University of Mississippi campus for England
and Italy, where he will spend the winter months in study.

[ 31 ]

Young Falkner is expecting also to complete a number of
poems started in this country.

But when Faulkner reached New Orleans to take a ship
he postponed the trip and settled in the city's French
Quarter for several important months in which he
changed from a writer who had expected to continue, as
in his University years, to devote his energy to poetry into
a writer who was to give his energy during the next decades
to fiction — and with magnificent results. It was in New
Orleans that Faulkner almost at once began writing
sketches for the Double Dealer and for the Picayune, the
first fiction for which he had received payment; and
within a few months of his arrival at New Orleans he had
completed Soldiers' Pay, the first of his many novels.

During his months in New Orleans Faulkner returned
from time to time to the University of Mississippi, where,
in addition to dating the manuscript of an unpublished
poem from there on February 26, 1925, he took some
part in the production of a University humor magazine
called The Scream, being officially listed on the staff in
1925 as one of the art editors. Associates remember that
he possibly made designs and drawings for another humor
magazine, but whether he did or not remains uncertain
and the drawings have not come to light. In May, 1925,
a few weeks before he left New Orleans for Europe, The
Scream printed three pieces of work which are the last
this investigation has found signed by Faulkner in any
University of Mississippi publication. Just as his first three
signed contributions had been eight years before, these
three were drawings.

[ 32 ]

But Faulkner's connection with The Scream was not
quite over with their publication or even with the publi-
cation the next autumn of an unsigned drawing showing a
man dangling outside an airplane in death drag acro-
batics which seems to be in Faulkner's style. Not until
May of 1927, when he had already published his second
novel, did the staff of The Scream, financially pressed and
appreciative of his draftsmanship, cut in half their 1925
plate of his drawing showing two men watching three
women boarding a streetcar and print the parts as illus-
trations of two jokes, to end by a kind of amitosis the
series of contributions to University of Mississippi publi-
cations which William Faulkner had begun in 1917.

[ 33 ]

William Faulkner:
Early Prose and Poetry

I'M^R

[ 36 ]

[ 37 ]

L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune

I follow through the singing trees
Her streaming clouded hair and face
And lascivious dreaming knees
Like gleaming water from some place
Of sleeping streams, or autumn leaves
Slow shed through still, love-wearied air.
She pauses: and as one who grieves
Shakes down her blown and vagrant hair
To veil her face, but not her eyes —
A hot quick spark, each sudden glance,
Or like the wild brown bee that flies
Sweet winged, a sharp extravagance
Of kisses on my limbs and neck.
She whirls and dances through the trees
That lift and sway like arms and fleck
Her with quick shadows, and the breeze
Lies on her short and circled breast.
Now hand in hand with her I go,
The green night in the silver west
Of virgin stars, pale row on row
Like ghostly hands, and ere she sleep
The dusk will take her by some stream
In silent meadows, dim and deep —
In dreams of stars and dreaming dream.

I have a nameless wish to go
To some far silent midnight noon

[ 39 }

Where lonely streams whisper and flow
And sigh on sands blanched by the moon,
And blond limbed dancers whirling past,
The senile worn moon staring through
The sighing trees, until at last,
Their hair is powdered bright with dew.
And their sad slow limbs and brows
Are petals drifting on the breeze
Shed from the fingers of the boughs;
Then suddenly on all of these,
A sound like some great deep bell stroke
Falls, and they dance, unclad and cold —
It was the earth's great heart that broke
For springs before the world grew old.

WILLIAM FAULKNER.

[ 40

CATHAY.

Sharp sands, those blind desert horsemen, sweep

Where yesterday tall shining carvels

Swam in thy golden past. What Fate foretells

That now the winds go lightly, lest thy sleep

Be broken? Where once thy splendors rose,

And cast their banners bright against the sky,

Now go the empty years infinitely

Rich with thy ghosts. So is it: who sows

The seed of Fame, makes the grain for Death to reap.

Wanderers, with faces sharp as spears,

And flocks and herds on aimless muffled feet

Drift where glittering kings went through each street

Of thy white vanished cities, and the years

Have closed like walls behind them. Still

Through the spawn of lesser destinies,

We stare, where once thy stars burned, lest like these,

We lose faith. They know thee not, nor will

To see thy magic empire when the Hand

Thrusts back the curtain of the shifting sand,

On singing stars and lifting golden hill.

William Falkner,
University Mississippi.

[ 41 ]

LANDING IN LUCK.
By William Falkner.

The machine levelled off and settled on the aerodrome.
It turned and taxied back and stopped, headed into the
wind again, its engine running idle. The instructor in the
forward cockpit faced about and raised his goggles.

"Fairish," he said, "not so bad. How many hours have
you had?"

Cadet Thompson, a "barracks ace," who had just
made a fairly creditable landing, assumed an expression
of assured confidence.

"Seven hours and nine minutes, sir."

"Think you can — hold that stick back, will you? —
think you can take her round alone?"

"Yes, sir," he answered as he had answered at least
four times a day for the last three days, with the small
remaining part of his unconquered optimism in his voice.
The instructor climbed slowly out onto the lower wing,
then to the ground, stretching his legs. He got a cigarette
from his clothes after a fashion resembling sleight-of-
hand.

[ 42 ]

"You've got to solo some day. The C. O. gave us all a
raggin' last night. It's chaps like you that give this stage
such a name for inefficiency. Here you have had seven
hours, and yet you never know if you are goin' to land on
this aerodrome or down at Borden. And then you always
pick a house or another machine to land on. What ever
brought you to think you could fly? Swear I don't know
what to do with you. Let you try it and break your neck,
cr recommend you for discharge. Get rid of you either
way, and a devilish good thing, too."

A silence hung heavily about Thompson's unhappy
head. The instructor, sucking his cigarette, stared off
across the aerodrome, where other wild and hardy ama-
teurs took off, landed and crashed. A machine descended
tail high, levelled off too soon and landed in a series of
bumps like an inferior tennis ball.

"See that chap there? He's probably had half your
time but he makes landings alone. But you, you cut your
gun and sit up there like a blind idiot and when you con-
descend to dive the bus, you try your best to break our
necks, yours and mine too; and I'll say right now, that's
somethin' none of you rockin' chair aviators is goin' to
do. Well, it's your neck or my reputation, now. Take her
off, and what ever you do, keep your nose down."

Thompson pulled down his goggles. He had been
angry enough to kill his officer for the better part of a
week, so added indignities rested but lightly upon him.
He was a strange mixture of fear and pride as he opened
the throttle wide and pushed the stick forward — fear

[43 ]

that he would wreck the machine landing, and pride that
he was on his own at last. He was no physical coward,
his fear was that he would show himself up before his
less fortunate friends to whom he had talked largely of
spins and side slips and gliding angles.

All-in-all, he was in no particularly safe frame of mind
for his solo flight. He gained speed down the field. The
tail was off the ground now and Thompson, more or less
nervous, though he had taken the machine off like a
veteran with the instructor aboard, pulled the stick back
before the machine had gained speed sufficient to rise.
It lurched forward and the tail sank heavily, losing more
speed. He knew that he had gone too far down the field
and should turn back and take off again, so he closed the
throttle. When the noise of the engine ceased he heard the
instructor shouting at him, and the splutter of a motor
cycle. Sending after him, were they? Cadet Thompson
was once more cleanly angry. He jerked the throttle
open.

His subconscious mind had registered a cable across
the end of the field, and he had flown enough to know
that it was touch and go as to whether he would clear
it. He was afraid of rising too soon again and he knew
that he would not stop in time were he to close the
throttle now. So, his eyes on the speed indicator, he pulled
the stick back. The motion at once became easier and he
climbed as much as he dared.

A shock; he closed his eyes, expecting to go over and
down on his back in the road below. When nothing hap-
pened he ventured a frightened hurried glance. Below him

[ 44 1

was the yellow of a wheat field and the aerodrome far to
the rear.

So the cable had broken! Must have, for here he was
still going forward. His altimeter showed two hundred
feet. Thompson felt like shouting. Now he'd show 'em
what flying was. Rotten, was he? He'd pull a perfect land-
ing and walk up to that officer and tell him just what kind
of a poor fish he was.

"Blasted Englishman," he said, "thinks he's the only
man in this wing who can really fly. Bet if he'd a' hit that
cable he'd a' been on his back in that road, right now.
Wish t'hell he was."

He made his turn carefully. Below at the edge of the
aerodrome stood the ambulance, its crew gaping foolishly
at him. "Like fish," he thought, "like poor fish." He
leaned out of his cockpit and gestured pleasantly at them,
a popular gesture known to all peoples of the civilized
world.

Eight hundred feet. "High enough," he decided, and
made another circle, losing height. He picked his spot
on the field. "Now," he thought, cut the throttle and
pushed the stick forward. He found a good gliding angle,
wires singing, engine idle and long flames wrapping back
from the exhausts. The field was filled with people run-
ning about and flapping their arms. Another machine rose
to meet him. He opened the throttle and closed it again,
a warning. "Why'n the hell don't they get off and lemme
land?" he wondered.

The other machine passed him in a long bank, its oc-
cupants shouting at him; one of them carried something

[ 45 ]

to which he gestured and pointed frantically. Thompson
came out of his dive. They circled again and he saw that
the object was about the size and shape of a wheel?
A wheel from the landing gear of a machine. What kind
of a joke was this? Why had they brought a wheel up to
show him? He'd seen lots of wheels. Had two on his ma-
chine — on his machine — wheels? Then Thompson
remembered the cable. He had stripped a wheel on that
cable, then. There was nothing else it could mean. His
brain assimilated this fact calmly. Having lost a wheel, he
had nothing to land on. Therefore it were quite point-
less to bother about landing, immediately, anyway. So he
circled off and climbed, followed cautiously by the other
machine, like two strange dogs meeting.

"Sir," said an orderly, entering the mess where the
C. O. and three lesser lights were playing bridge, "sir, the
Flight Commander, B Flight, reports that a cadet is
abaht to crash."

" 'Crash?' " repeated the C. O.

"Out 'ere, sir. Yes, sir, 'e 'assn't got no landing gear."

" 'No landing gear?' What's this? What's this?"

"Yes, sir. 'E wiped it orf a-taking orf, sir. 'E's abaht
out of petrol and the Flight Commander says 'e'll be
a-coming down soon, sir."

"My word," said the C. O., going to the door and
closely followed by the others.

"There 'e is, sir, that's 'im in front."

"My word," said the C. O. again and went off toward
the hangars at a very good gait.

[ 46 ]

"What's this? What's this?" Approaching the group of
officers.

"Cadet Thompson, sir," volunteered one, "Mr.
Bessing's cadet. Oh, Bessing!"

Bessing came over, lifting his feet nervously.

"What's all this, Mr. Bessing?" The C. O. watched him
narrowly. An instructor gets a bad name when his cadet
crashes, he is responsible for the cadet's life as well as the
machine.

"Rotten take off, sir. He tried to rise too soon, and
when he failed, instead of comin' back and tryin' again,
he carried right on. Struck that cable and lost his right
wheel and he's been sittin' up there ever since. We sent
another chap up to pull him up a bit. He's almost out of
petrol and he'll have to come down soon."

"H-m. Didn't send him up too soon, did you, Mr.
Bessing?"

"Chap's had seven hours, sir," he protested, and pro-
duced Thompson's card.

The C. O. studied it a moment, then returned it.

"Wharton, sir?" He helped the C. O. to a light and lit
a cigarette for himself.

"Good lad, good lad," said the C. O., shading his
eyes as he stared into the sky. "Something in you people
at this wing, though. Cadets and officers both. N. C. O.'s
got it, too. G. O. C. gave me a jolly raggin' not a fortnight
ago. Do something. Do something, swear I will."

The drone from the engines above suddenly ceased.
Thompson was out of petrol at last. The two machines

[ 47 ]

descended in a wide spiral, and they on the earth stood
watching him as he descended, as utterly beyond any
human aid as though he were on another planet.

"Here they come," Bessing muttered half aloud. "If
he only remembers to land on his left wing — the fool,
oh, the blind, bounding fool!"

For Thompson's nerve was going as he neared the
earth. The temptation was strong to kick his rudder over
and close his eyes. The machine descended, barely re-
taining headway. He watched the approaching ground
utterly unable to make any pretence of levelling off, para-
lyzed; his brain had ceased to function, he was all staring
eyes watching the remorseless earth. He did not know
his height, the ground rushed past too swiftly to judge,
but he expected to crash any second. Thompson's fate
was on the laps of the Gods.

The tail touched, bounded, scraped again. The left
wing was low and the wing tip crumpled like paper. A
tearing of fabric, a strut snapped, and he regained do-
minion over his limbs, but too late to do anything — were
there anything to be done. The machine struck again,
solidly, slewed around and stood on its nose.

Bessing was the first to reach him.

"Lord, Lord!" he was near weeping from nervous ten-
sion. "Are you all right? Never expected you'd come
through, never expected it! Didn't think to see you alive!
Don't ever let anyone else say you can't fly. Comin' out
of that was a trick many an old flyer couldn't do! I say,
are you all right?"

Hanging face downward from the cockpit, Cadet
Thompson looked at Bessing, surprised at the words of
this cold, short tempered officer. He forgot the days of
tribulation and insult in this man's company, and his
recent experience, and his eyes filled with utter adora-
tion. Then he became violently ill.

That night Thompson sat gracefully on a table in
the writing room of a down town hotel, tapping a boot
with his stick and talking to sundry companions.

" — and so, when my petrol gave out, I knew it was
up to me. I had already thought of a plan — I thought
of several, but this one seemed the best — which was to
put my tail down first and then drop my left wing, so
the old bus wouldn't turn over and lie down on me. Well,
it worked just as I had doped it out, only a ditch those
fool A. M.'s had dug right across the field, mind you,
tripped her up and she stood on her nose. I had thought
of that, too, and pulled my belt up. Bessing said — he's
a pretty good scout — "

"Ah-h-h — " they jeered him down profanely.

"Look at the nerve he's got, will you?"

"He'—"

"Ah, we know you! Why, the poor bum crashed on
his solo, and listen at the line he's giving us!"

"Well, Bessing said — "

"Bessing said! Bessing said! Go tell the G.O.C. what
Bessing said!"

"Dammit, don't I know what Bessing said? Ask him!
That's all. You're a bunch of poor hams that think you

[ 49 ]

can fly! Why, I got an hour and a half solo time. You
poor fish. Ask Bessing! there's a guy that knows what's
what."

He flung out of the room. They watched him with
varying expressions.

"Say," spoke one, a cadet but recently enlisted and
still in ground school: "D' you think he really did all
that? He must be pretty good."

"That guy? That guy fly? He's so rotten they can't
discharge him. Every time he goes up they have to get
a gun and shoot him down. He's the T out of flying.
Biggest liar in the R.A.F."

Thompson passed through again, with Bessing, and
his arm was through the officer's. He was deep in discus-
sion evidently, but he looked up in time to give them a
cheerfully condescending:

"Hello, you chaps."

[ 50 ]

SAPPHICS.

So it is : sleep comes not on my eyelids.
Nor in my eyes, with shaken hair and white
Aloof pale hands, and lips and breasts of iron,
So she beholds me.

And yet though sleep comes not to me, there comes
A vision from the full smooth brow of sleep,
The white Aphrodite moving unbounded
By her own hair.

In the purple beaks of the doves that draw her,
Beaks straight without desire, necks bent backward
Toward Lesbos and the flying feet of Loves
Weeping behind her.

She looks not back, she looks not back to where
The nine crowned muses about Apollo
Stand like nine Corinthian columns singing
In clear evening.

She sees not the Lesbians kissing mouth
To mouth across lute strings, drunken with singing,
Nor the white feet of the Oceanides
Shining and unsandalled.

[ 51 ]

Before her go cryings and lamentations
Of barren women, a thunder of wings,
While ghosts of outcast Lethean women, lamenting,
Stiffen the twilight.

William Falkner,
University, Miss.

[ 52 ]

AFTER FIFTY YEARS.

Her house is empty and her heart is old,
And filled with shades and echoes that deceive
No one save her, for still she tries to weave
With blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold.
Once all men's arms rose up to her, 'tis told,
And hovered like white birds for her caress:
A crown she could have had to bind each tress
Of hair, and her sweet arms the Witches' Gold.

Her mirrors know her whiteness, for there
She rose in dreams from other dreams that lent
Her softness as she stood, crowned with soft hair.
And with his bound heart and his young eyes bent
And blind, he feels her presence like shed scent,
Holding him body and life within its snare.

W. FAULKNER.

[ 53 ]

UNE BALLADE DES FEMMES PERDUES

'Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan'

I sing in the green dusk

Fatuously

Of ladies that I have loved

— £a ne fait rien! Helas, vraiment, vraiment

Gay little ghosts of loves in silver sandals
They dance with quick feet on my lute strings
With the abandon of boarding school virgins
While unbidden moths
Amorous of my white seraglio
Call them with soundless love songs
A sort of ethereal seduction

They hear, alas

My women

And brush my lips with little ghostly kisses

Stealing away

Singly, their tiny ardent faces

Like windflowers from some blown garden of dreams

To their love nights among the roses

I am old, and alone
And the star dust from their wings
Has dimmed my eyes
I sing in the green dusk

Of lost ladies — Si vraiment charmant, charmant.

— W. Falkner.

[ 54 1

NAIADS' SONG.

Come ye sorrowful and keep

Tryst with us here in wedded sleep,

The silent noon lies over us

And shaken ripples cover us,

Our arms are soft as is the stream.

Come keep with us our slumbrous dream

Disheartened ones, if ye are sad,

If ye are in a garment clad

Of sorrow, come with us to sleep

In undulations dim and deep;

Where sunlight spreads and quivering lies

To draw in golden reveries

Its fingers through our glistered hair,

Finding profound contentment there.

Come ye sorrowful and weep

No more in waking, come and steep

Yourselves in us as does the bee

Plunge in the rose that, singing, he

Has opened. Here our mouths unfold

As does a flower bare its gold;

Our mouths are soft as any rose

That in a high walled garden grows,

A garden level as a cup

With the sunlight that fills it up.

[ 55 ]

Come ye sorrowful and sleep

Within our arms beneath the sweep

Of winds that whisper in the trees,

And boughs that whisper to the breeze

In a sad extravagance

Of dancers in a hushed dance;

When Pan sighs and his pipes doth blow

While sky above and earth below

Stand still and hearken to his strain,

And sigh also as does the rain

Through woodland lanes remote and cool

To dream upon a leafed pool.

Come ye sorrowful and keep
Tryst with us here in wedded sleep,
Our eyes are soft as twilit streams,
Our breasts are soft as silken dreams
And white at dusk; our breasts the beds
On which we soothe all aching heads,
Binding each in a scented tress
Till glides he in forgetfulness,
While the night sighs and whispers by
Sowing stars across the sky.
Come ye sorrowful and keep
Here in unmeasured dream and sleep.

— W. FALKNER.

[ 56

(: \jO I O ■ tXfOLA

FANTOCHES.

a Paul Verlaine.

Scaramouches and Pucinella
Cast one shadow on the mellow
Night, and kiss against the sky

And the doctor of Bogona

In his skull cap and kimono

Seeks for simples with pale avid eye

While his daughter half naked
Glides trembling from her narrow bed
To meet her lover waiting in the moon

Her lover from the Spanish Main
Whose passion thrills her with a strain
La lune ne garde aucune rancune

W. FALKNER.

[ 57 ]

CLAIR DE LUNE.
From PAUL VERLAINE.

Your soul is a lovely garden, and go
There masque and bergamasque charmingly,
Playing the lute and dancing and also
Sad beneath their disguising fanchise.*

All are singing in a minor key

Of conqueror love and life opportune,

Yet seem to doubt their joyous revelry

As their song melts in the light of the moon.

In the calm moonlight, so lovely fair
That makes the birds dream in the slender trees,
While fountains dream among the statues there;
Slim fountains sob in silver ecstasies.

— W. FALKNER.

: See Notes on the Text, page 128.

[ 58 ]

STREETS.
FROM PAUL VERLAINE.

Dance the Jig!

I loved her pretty eyes

Fairer than starry skies

And bright with malicious subtleties

Dance the Jig!

She had those dainty airs

That fill poor hearts with tears

Ah, how truly charming were her airs

Dance the Jig!

But this solace is mine

To kiss her mouth and find

That now to her my heart is deaf and blind

Dance the Jig!

Her face will ever be
In my mind's infinity
She broke the coin and gave it half to me

Dance the Jig!

— W. FALKNER.

[ 59 1

A POPLAR.

Why do you shiver there

Between the white river and the road?

You are not cold,

With the sun light dreaming about you;

And yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as though

To draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness.

You are a young girl

Trembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty,

A white objective girl

Whose clothing has been forcibly taken away from her.

— W. FALKNER.

[ 60

A CLYMENE.

(From Paul Verlaine.)

Mystical chords
Songs without words
Dearest, because your eyes
Color of the skies.

Because your voice estranges
My vision, and deranges
And troubles the horizon
Of my reason.

Because your hidden slightness
Like a swan's graceful whiteness
Has filled my soul's room
With your perfume.

Because all of my being
In my breathing and seeing
Is a lingering like flowers
Of your hours.

A nimbus that dances
In my heart and entrances,
So shall it ever be
Through infinity.

W. FALKNER.

[ 61 ]

STUDY.

Somewhere a slender voiceless breeze will go
Unlinking the shivering poplars' arms, and brakes
With sleeves simply crossed where waters flow;
A sunless stream quiet and deep, that slakes
The thirsty alders pausing there at dawn.
(Hush, now, hush. Where was I? Jonson)

Somewhere a candle's guttering gold
Weaves a tapestry upon a cottage wall
And her gold hair, simple fold on fold,
While I can think of nothing else at all
Except the sunset in her eyes' still pool.
(Work, work, you fool! — )

Somewhere a blackbird lost within a wood
Whistles through its golden wired throat;
Some ways are white with birches in a hood
Of silver shaken by his mellow note,
Trembling gaspingly as though in fear;
Where the timid violet first appear.

(Muted dreams for them, for me
Bitter science. Exams are near
And my thoughts uncontrollably
Wander, and I cannot hear

[ 62 ]

The voice telling me that work I must,

For everything will be the same when I am dead

A thousand years. I wish I were a bust

All head.)

— W. FALKNER.

[ 63 ]

ALMA MATER.

All our eyes and hearts look up to thee,
For here all our voiceless dreams are spun
Between thy walls, quiet in dignity
Lent by the spirits of them whose lives begun
Within thy portals. Through them we can see
Upon the mountain top the shining sun
Success, drawing us infinitely
Upwardly, until Life and Task are one.

The beginning, not the end, is this.

Onward, by her unremitting grace

With memories that nothing can efface

Throned securely in our hearts; to kiss

— Holding, and held by her in fond embrace -

At parting, her kind calmly dreaming face.

— W. FALKNER.

[ 64 ]

proaiyzdndu

f. "

[ 66 }

L« QK»n4 Acwicam* Parlei-vcui An<jlait. wamttlli I

L<X pelilc Fvancaitt- /V\au oo«. /»'fcHur, un p«u; Do you lofe ■»« ? K**t *e oute'*! Oa^n! ' ?l|

[ 67 ]

>Sociv\l -Activities

Pe8J3lue

[ 69

To a Co-ed

The dawn herself could not more beauty wear
Than you 'mid other women crowned in grace,
Nor have the sages known a fairer face
Than yours, gold-shadowed by your bright sweet hair.
Than you does Venus seem less heavenly fair;
The twilit hidden stillness of your eyes,
And throat, a singing bridge of still replies,
A slender bridge, yet all dreams hover there.

I could have turned unmoved from Helen's brow,
Who found no beauty in their Beatrice;
Their Thais seemed less lovely then as now,
Though some had bartered Athens for her kiss.
For down Time's arras, faint and fair and far,
Your face still beckons like a lonely star.

W. Falkner.

[ 70 ]

BOOKS AND THINGS

We are presenting this week a review by William S.
[sic] Falkner of "In April Once" by W. A. Percy, Yale
University Press; later we shall give a discussion of some
of the poets who are representative of the spirit of the
present in the form and content of their verse.

In April Once by W. A. Percy
Mr. Percy is a native Mississippian, a graduate of the
University of the South and of the Harvard Law School.
He was a member of the Belgian Relief Commission in
the early days of the war, then served as a lieutenant
attached to the 37th Division. He now lives in Green-
ville.

Mr. Percy — like alas! how many of us — suffered the
misfortune of having been born out of his time. He should
have lived in Victorian England and gone to Italy with
Swinburne, for like Swinburne, he is a mixture of pas-
sionate adoration of beauty and as passionate a despair
and disgust with its manifestations and accessories in the
human race. His muse is Latin in type — poignant ecsta-
sies of lyrical extravagance and a short lived artificial
strength achieved at the cost of true strength in beauty.

[ 71 ]

Beauty, to him, is almost jike physical pain, evident in the
simplicity of this poem which is the nearest perfect thing
in the book —

I heard a bird at break of day

Sing from the autumn trees
A song so mystical and calm,

So full of certainties,
No man, I think, could listen long

Except upon his knees.
Yet this was but a simple bird

Alone, among dead trees.

The influence of the frank pagan beauty worship of
the past is heavily upon him, he is like a little boy closing
his eyes against the dark of modernity which threatens
the bright simplicity and the colorful romantic pageantry
of the middle ages with which his eyes are full. One can
imagine him best as a violinist who became blind about
the time Mozart died, it would seem that the last thing
he saw with his subjective intellect was Browning standing
in naive admiration before his own mediocrity, of which
Mr. Percy's "Epistle from Corinth" is the fruit. This is
far and away the best thing in the book, and would have
been better except for the fact that Mr. Percy, like every
man who has ever lived, is the victim of his age.

As a whole, the book sustains its level of lyrical beauty.
Occasionally it becomes pure vowelization, for it is not
always the word that Mr. Percy seeks, but the sound.
There is one element that will tend more than anything
else to help it oblivionward, this is the section devoted
to war poems. How many, many, many reams of paper

[ 72 ]

that have been ruined with poetry appertaining to the late
war no one, probably, will ever know, yet still the
nightingales wear swords and Red Cross brassards.

Mr. Percy has not written a great book, — there is too
much music in it for that, he is a violinist with an inferior
instrument — yet (and most unusual as modern books
of poetry go) the gold outweighs the dross. How much,
I would not undertake to say, for he is a difficult person
to whom to render justice; like Swinburne, he obscures
the whole mental horizon, one either likes him passion-
ately or one remains forever cold to him.

[ 73 ]

BOOKS & THINGS

Turns and Movies.
By Conrad Aiken. Houghton Mifflin Company.

In the fog generated by the mental puberty of contem-
porary American versifiers while writing inferior Keats
or sobbing over the middle west, appears one rift of
heaven sent blue — the poems of Conrad Aiken. He,
alone of the entire yelping pack, seems to have a definite
goal in mind. The others — there are perhaps half a
dozen exceptions — are so many loud sounds lost in a
single depth of privet hedge; the others lay about them
lustily with mouth open and eyes closed, some in more or
less impenetrable thickets of Browningesque obscurity,
others hopelessly mired in the swamps of mediocrity, and
all are creating a last flurry before darkness kindly en-
gulfs them.

Many of them have realized that aesthetics is as much
a science as chemistry, that there are certain definite
scientific rules which, when properly applied, will pro-
duce great art as surely as certain chemical elements,
combined in the proper proportions, will produce certain
reactions; yet Mr. Aiken alone has made any effort to
discover them and apply them intelligently. Nothing is

[ 74 ]

ever accidental with him, he has most happily escaped
our national curse of filling each and every space, reli-
gious, physical, mental and moral, and beside him the
British nightingales, Mr. Vachel Lindsay with his tin
pan and iron spoon, Mr. Kreymborg with his lithographic
water coloring, and Mr. Carl Sandburg with his senti-
mental Chicago propaganda are so many puppets fum-
bling in windy darkness.

Mr. Aiken has a plastic mind, he uses variation, in-
version, change of rhythm and such metrical tricks with
skillful effect, and his clear impersonality will never per-
mit him to write poor verse. He is never a press agent as
are so many of his contemporaries. It is rather difficult to
quote an example from him, as he has written with cer-
tain musical forms in mind, and any division of his work
corresponding to the accepted dimensions of a poem is
as a single chord to a fugue; yet the three quatrains from
Discordants:

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved, —
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always, —
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

[ 75 ]

This is one of the most beautifully, impersonally sin-
cere poems of all time.

The most interesting phase of Mr. Aiken's work is
his experiments with an abstract three dimensional verse
patterned on polyphonic music form: The Jig of Forslin
and The House of Dust. This is interesting because of
the utterly unlimited possibilities of it, he has the whole
world before him; for as yet no one has made a successful
attempt to synthesize musical reactions with abstract
documentary reactions. Miss Amy Lowell tried a poly-
phonic prose which, in spite of the fact that she has cre-
ated some delightful statuettes of perfectly blown glass,
is merely a literary flatulency; and it has left her, reed in
hand, staring in naive surprise at the air whence her
bubbles have burst.

Mr. Aiken has never been haphazard, he has devel-
oped steadily, never for a moment at a loss, yet it is al-
most impossible to discover where his initial impulse
came from. At times it seems that he is completing a
cycle back to the Greeks, again there seem to be faint
traces of the French symbolists, scattered through his
poems are bits of soft sonority that Masefield might have
formed; and so at last one returns to the starting point
— from where did he come, and where is he going? It is
interesting to watch, for — say in fifteen years — when
the tide of aesthetic sterility which is slowly engulfing us
has withdrawn, our first great poet will be left. Perhaps
he is the man.

W. FALKNER.

[ 76 ]

CO-EDUCATION AT OLE MISS.

Ernest says, to Ernestine —
Thou art my little queen — O,

Thou art the girl

Of all the world
Who makes my heart beat mean — O;

For night and day

When thou art away,
Thy fair face fills my bean — O,

An lov'st thou me

As I love thee,
Let's off to Gretna Green — O.

W. FALKNER.

[ 77 ]

riSH. PLECH, fQWL

[ 78 ]

A.E.F: CLUB

THIHK HOW MAflY TIMES THIS BIRD'S

beeh meeED. he got a <?rcix

DE GuERrrt with PAlff\S.

[ 79 ]

MRRI0HLTTE3

[ SO

MOCTURWC.

LoloMbine lean& aUc Ine Japei- jlaMe :

C oloMbine |lma<j a toit.

One |linci2 a eevei-ed hand ai Ren-oj'e {eel.

Benind, a pei-pindiculqr wall of zWsj
Delow) a alea/u o| enow?,.

rierrol tpmz and whirL, heci-of \z jleetj

\~]e whirl?, ni£ nandc like Dirde, upon +ne /noon.

rierrot cpme and wmrlt ....
His eyes, are jillea wilh|acet& oi Many woj-lds
Ol eilvel' anc* ^'ue an<J qreen;
Find he would hide his head, yet Ine keen
blue qavkne&o

Cuts nie ar/we, away |wm nis jace.

_ i elcn ! fl violin

freezes injo a blade, eo bnaU and J^n
t piercee lliroucjn he Li-ain, info |,,e UqJ

ep-lled Ly a p,a of *u2,c on (Le aU.

'Rnd h.

e i6 epined

Swift -the wiepg o| wolion blown aci-oed the /vtoon •

ColoMbine jlinae a paper rose, —

Pierrot jliic like a while Mollj on tlue da^.

Black -Ike lapei-j chai-p (heir Afoulhg, m efcu-dqU
Tne sky will icy rooHeee. |lowe»-e aaun+ly q(ow?,.
Ttay ate etilfly Wen, phcjM and elq.^.

BOOKS & THINGS

Aria da Capo: a Play in One Act, by Edna St.
Vincent Millay.

Something new enough to be outstanding in this age
of mental puberty, this loud gesturing of the aesthetic
messiahs of our emotional Valhalla who have one eye on
the ball and the other on the grandstand. In newspaper
parlance Miss Millay might be said to have scored a
'beat'; truly so in the sense that her contemporaries (those
of them who will ever become aware that she has done
something 'different') will each wonder to himself why
he or she did not think of it first, which is very natural.
Here is an idea so simple that it does give to wonder why
under heaven no one has thought of it before. Its sim-
plicity is doubtless the reason.

The play is a slight thing in itself; the surprising fresh-
ness of the idea of a pastoral tragedy enacted and con-
cluded by interlopers against a conventional background
of paper streamers and colored confetti in the midst of a
thoroughly artificial Pierrot and Columbine suite alone
makes it worth a second glance. Yet, this is an unjust
statement; for about all modern playwrights and versifiers

[ 84 ]

offer us is a sterile clashing of ideas innocent of imagina-
tion; a species of emotional shorthand. Aria da Capo
possesses more than a clever idea skilfully carried out,
yet it is difficult to put the hand on just what makes it
go; there is no unusual depth of experience, either mental
or physical, to be traced from it other than those charac-
teristics acquired without conscious effort by every young
writer, from the reading done during the period of his
mental development, either from choice or compulsion.
The language is good; the rhyme neither faltering through
too close attention, nor careless from lack of it; the
choice of words, with one exception — a speech of
Pierrot's which I do not remember contains a word of
inexcusable crudeness — is sound: and — heaven sent
genius — the play is not too long; i.e., no padding, no
mental sofa pillows to break the fall of the doomed and
tiring mind. A lusty tenuous simplicity; the gods have
given Miss Millay a strong wrist; and though an idea
alone does not make or mar a piece of writing, it is some-
thing; and this one of hers will live even though Miss
Amy Lowell intricately festoons it with broken glass, or
Mr. Carl Sandburg sets it in the stock yards, to be acted,
of a Saturday afternoon, by the Beef Butchers' Union.

W. F.

[ 85 ]

BOOKS & THINGS
AMERICAN DRAMA: EUGENE O'NEILL.

Some one has said — a Frenchman, probably; they
have said everything — that art is preeminently provin-
cial: i.e., it comes directly from ascertain age and a cer-
tain locality. This is a very profound statement; for Lear
and Hamlet and All's Well could never have been written
anywhere save in England during Elizabeth's reign (this
is proved by the Hamlets that have come out of Denmark
and Sweden, and the All's Well of French comedy) nor
could Madame Bovary have been written in any place
other than the Rhone valley in the nineteenth century;
and just as Balzac is nineteenth century Paris. But there
are exceptions to this, as there are to all rules holding a
particle of truth; two modern ones being Conrad and
Eugene O'Neill. These two men are anomalies, Joseph
Conrad especially; this man has overturned all literary
tradition in this point. It is too soon yet to be committed
about O'Neill, though young as he is, he is already a
quantity to make one wonder at the truth of the above
assertion.

It is not especially difficult — after a man has written

[ 86 ]

and passed on — to trace the threads which were drawn
together by him and put on paper in the form of his own
work. It can be seen how Shakespeare ruthlessly took
what he needed from his predecessors and contempo-
raries, leaving behind him a drama which the hand does
not hold blood that can cap; the German playwrights
have obviously and logically followed their destinies
according to the Teutonic standards of thought down to
the work of Hauptmann and Moeller; Synge is provincial,
smacking of the soil from which he sprang as no other
modern does (Synge is dead now); while the one man
who is accomplishing anything in American drama is a
contradiction to all concepts of art.

This may be because of the fact that America has no
drama or literature worth the name, and hence no tradi-
tion. If this be the reason, one must perforce believe
that the Fates have indeed played a scurvy trick upon
him in casting into twentieth century America a man
who might go to astounding lengths in a land possessing
traditions. Facts about Conrad, however, who is even
more of a contradiction than O'Neill, supply a basis for
hoping that chance is not diabolical enough to perpetrate
such a thing; and also show what an incalculable, inde-
finable quantity genius — horrible word — is.

The most unusual factor about O'Neill is that a modern
American should write plays about the sea. We have
had no salt water traditions for a hundred years. The
English are the wanderers, while we essentially are not.
Yet here is a man, son of a New York political "boss,"
raised in New York City and a student at Princeton, who

[ 87 ]

writes of the sea. He has been, through accident, a sailor
himself: he was shanghaied aboard a South American
bound vessel and was forced to make a voyage as an able
seaman from Rio to Liverpool in order to get home. He
is not physically strong, having congenitally weak lungs,
hence must lead a careful life as regards hardship and ex-
posure; and yet his first writing phase was dominated by
the sea.

And he has written good healthy plays, and — a
strange thing — New York has realized his possibilities.
"The Emperor Jones" played there, and "The Straw"
and "Anna Christie" are playing in New York this winter.
These last two are later plays, not of the sea, but the
thing that makes them go is the same that made "Gold"
and "Diff'rent" go, that made the "Emperor Jones" rise
up and swagger in his egoism and cruelty, and die at
last through his own hereditary fears: they all possess
the same clarity and simplicity of plot and language. No-
body since "The Playboy" has gotten the force behind
stage language that O'Neill has. The Emperor Jones'
"who dat dare whistle in de Emperor's palace?" goes back
to the "Playboy's" "the likes of which would make the
mitred bishops themselves strain at the bars of paradise
for to see the lady Helen walking in her golden shawl."

He is still developing; his later plays "The Straw" and
"Anna Christie" betray a changing attitude toward his
characters, a change from a detached observation of his
people brought low by sheer circumstance, to a more
personal regard for their joys and hopes, their sufferings
and despairs. Perhaps in time he will make something

[ 88 ]

of the wealth of natural dramatic material in this country,
the greatest source being our language. A national litera-
ture cannot spring from folk lore — though heaven
knows, such a forcing has been tried often enough —
for America is too big and there are too many folk lores:
Southern negroes, Spanish and French strains, the old
west, for these always will remain colloquial; nor will it
come through our slang, which also is likewise indigenous
to restricted portions of the country. It can, however,
come from the strength of imaginative idiom which is
understandable by all who read English. Nowhere to-
day, saving in parts of Ireland, is the English language
spoken with the same earthy strength as it is in the United
States; though we are, as a nation, still inarticulate.

W. F.

[ 89

THE HILL

Before him and slightly above his head, the hill crest
was clearly laid on the sky. Over it slid a sibilant invisi-
bility of wind like a sheet of water, and it seemed to him
that he might lift his feet from the road and swim up-
ward and over the hill on this wind which filled his
clothing, tightening his shirt across his chest, flapping
his loose jacket and trousers about him, and which
stirred the thick uncombed hair above his stubby quiet
face. His long shadow legs rose perpendicularly and fell,
ludicrously, as though without power of progression, as
though his body had been mesmerized by a whimsical
God to a futile puppet-like activity upon one spot, while
time and life terrifically passed him and left him behind.
At last his shadow reached the crest and fell headlong
over it.

The opposite valley rim came first into sight, azure
and aloof, in the level afternoon sun. Against it, like
figures rising in a dream, a white church spire rose, then
house-tops, red and faded green and olive half hidden in
budded oaks and elms. Three poplars twinkled their
leaves against a gray sunned wall over which leaned
peach and apple trees in an extravagance of fragile pink
and white; and though there was no wind in the valley,

[ 90 ]

bent narrowly to the quiet resistless compulsion of April
in their branches, then were still and straight again ex-
cept for the silver mist of their never ceasing, never es-
caping leaves. The entire valley stretched beneath him,
and his shadow, springing far out, lay across it, quiet
and enormous. Here and there a thread of smoke bal-
anced precariously upon a chimney. The hamlet slept,
wrapped in peace and quiet beneath the evening sun,
as it had slept for a century; waiting, invisibly honey-
combed with joys and sorrows, hopes and despairs, for
the end of time.

From the hilltop the valley was a motionless mosaic
of tree and house; from the hilltop were to be seen
no cluttered barren lots sodden with spring rain and
churned and torn by hoof of horse and cattle, no piles
of winter ashes and rusting tin cans, no dingy hoardings
covered with the tattered insanities of posted salacities
and advertisements. There was no suggestion of striving,
of whipped vanities, of ambition and lusts, of the drying
spittle of religious controversy; he could not see that
the sonorous simplicity of the court house columns was
discolored and stained with casual tobacco. In the valley
there was no movement save the thin spiraling of smoke
and the heart-tightening grace of the poplars, no sound
save the measured faint reverberation of an anvil.

The slow featureless mediocrity of his face twisted to
an internal impulse: the terrific groping of his mind. His
monstrous shadow lay like a portent upon the church,
and for a moment he had almost grasped something alien
to him, but it eluded him; and being unaware that there

[ 91 ]

was anything which had tried to break down the barriers
of his mind and communicate with him, he was unaware
that he had been eluded. Behind him was a day of harsh
labor with his hands, a strife against the forces of nature
to gain bread and clothing and a place to sleep, a victory
gotten at the price of bodily tissues and the numbered
days of his existence; before him lay the hamlet which
was home to him, the tieless casual; and beyond it lay
waiting another day of toil to gain bread and clothing
and a place to sleep. In this way he worked out the
devastating unimportance of his destiny, with a mind
heretofore untroubled by moral quibbles and principles,
shaken at last by the faint resistless force of spring in a
valley at sunset.

The sun plunged silently into the liquid green of the
west and the valley was abruptly in shadow. And as the
sun released him, who lived and labored in the sun, his
mind that troubled him for the first time, became quieted.
Here, in the dusk, nymphs and fauns might riot to a
shrilling of thin pipes, to a shivering and hissing of cym-
bals in a sharp volcanic abasement beneath a tall icy
star. * * * Behind him was the motionless conflagra-
tion of sunset, before him was the opposite valley rim
upon the changing sky. For a while he stood on one hori-
zon and stared across at the other, far above a world of
endless toil and troubled slumber; untouched, untouch-
able; forgetting, for a space, that he must return. * * *
He slowly descended the hill.

W. F.

[ 92 ]

BOOKS & THINGS

American Drama
Inhibitions

Only by means of some astounding blind machination
of chance will the next twenty-five years see in America
a fundamentally sound play — a structure solidly built,
properly produced and correctly acted. Playwrights and
actors are now at the mercy of circumstances which must
inevitably drive all imaginative people whose judgment
is not temporarily aberrant, to various conditions of
fancied relief; to a frank pandering to Frank Crane's
market — holding a spiritual spittoon, so to speak, for
that stratum which, unfortunately, has money in this
country — to Europe; and to synthetic whiskey.

Writing people are all so pathetically torn between a
desire to make a figure in the world and a morbid in-
terest in their personal egos — the deadly fruit of the
grafting of Sigmund Freud upon the dynamic chaos of
a hodge-podge of nationalities. And, with characteristic
national restlessness, those with imagination and some
talent find it unbearable. O'Neill has turned his back on
America to write of the sea, Marsden Hartley explodes

[ 93 ]

vindicative fire crackers in Montmartre, Alfred Kreym-
borg has gone to Italy, and Ezra Pound furiously toys
with spurious bronze in London. All have found America
aesthetically impossible; yet, being of America, will some
day return, a few into dyspeptic exile, others to write
joyously for the movies.

— 2 —

We have, in America, an inexhaustible fund of dra-
matic material. Two sources occur to any one: the old
Mississippi river days, and the romantic growth of rail-
roads. And yet, when the Mississippi is mentioned, Mark
Twain alone comes to mind: a hack writer who would
not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who
tricked out a few of the old proven "sure fire" literary
skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the super-
ficial and the lazy.*

Sound art, however, does not depend on the quality
or quantity of available material: a man with real ability
finds sufficient what he has to hand. Material does aid
that person who does not possess quite enough driving
force to create living figures out of his own brain; wealth
of material does enable him to build better than he
otherwise could. No one in America — no writer — can
detach himself from the national literary shibboleths and
pogroms to do this, though; those who are doing worth
while things really labor infinitely more than the results
achieved would show, for the reason that they must over-

* Faulkner's opinion of Twain subsequently rose, until in recent years
he has called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a candidate, with
Moby-Dick, for consideration as the greatest American book. — C.C.

[ 94 ]

come all this self torture, must first slay the dragons which
they, themselves, have raised. An apt instance was re-
lated to me by a dramatic critic on a New York magazine:
Robert Edmund Jones, a designer of stage settings, dis-
covered that, for some time, he had been subject to an
intangible ailment. He found that the quality of his work
had been mysteriously deteriorating, that his sleep and
appetite were being undermined. A friend — perhaps
the one who assisted him in discovering his alarming con-
dition — advised him to repair to a certain practitioner
of the new therapeutic psycho-analysis. He did so, was
"siked," and immediately recovered his appetite, his un-
troubled slumber, and his old zest in stage designing.
This is what all writers who are exposed to the prevail-
ing literary tendencies in America must combat; and,
so long as socialism, psycho-analysis and the aesthetic
attitude are profitable as well as popular, so long will
such conditions obtain.

One rainbow we have on our dramatic horizon: lan-
guage as it is spoken in America. In comparison with it,
British is a Sunday night affair of bread and milk —
melodious but slightly tiresome nightingales in a formal
clipped hedge. Other tongues are not considered here:
the Northman is essentially the poet and playwright, as
the Frenchman is the painter, and the German the musi-
cian. It does not always follow that a play built according
to sound rules — i.e. simplicity and strength of language,
thorough knowledge of material, and clarity of plot —
will be a good play as a result; else play writing would be-
come a comparatively simple process. (Language means

[ 95 ]

nothing to Shaw: except for the accident of birth he
might well have written in French.) In America, how-
ever, with our paucity of mental balance, language is our
logical savior. Very few authors are able to say anything
simply; these extremists fluctuate between the manners
of various dead-and-gone stylists — achieving therefrom
a vehicle which might well serve to advertise soap and
cigarettes — and sheer idiocy. Those who realize that
language is our best bet employ slang and our "hard"
colloquialisms in order to erect an edifice which resembles
that of a mason who endeavors to build a skyscraper with
brick alone, forgetting the need of a steel skeleton within
it.

Our wealth of language and our inarticulateness (in-
ability to derive any benefit from the language) are due
to the same cause: our racial chaos and our instinctive
quickness to realize our simpler needs, and to supply
them from any source. As a nation, we are a people of
action (the astounding growth of the moving picture
industry is a proof); even our language is action rather
than communication between minds: those who might
be justly called men of ideas take their thinking con-
sciously, a matter of mental agility like an inverted
Swedish exercise, and they frankly and naively call upon
all near them to see and admire.

This is the Hydra which we have raised, and which
we become pessimists or idiots slaying; who have the
fundamentals of the lustiest language of modern times;
a language that seems, to the newly arrived foreigner,
a mass of subtleties for the reason that it is employed

[ 96 ]

only as a means of relief, when physical action is im-
possible or unpleasant, by all classes, ranging from the
Harvard professor, through the gardeniaed aloof young
liberal, to the lowliest pop vendor at the ball park.

W. F.

[ 97 ]

Portrait

By WILLIAM FAULKNER

Raise your hand between us, to your face,
And draw the opaque curtains on your eyes.
Let us walk here, softly checked with shadow,
And talk of careful trivialities.

Let us lightly speak at random; tonight's movie,
Repeat a broken conversation, word for word;
Of friends, and happiness. The darkness scurries,
And we hear again a music both have heard

Singing blood to blood between our palms.
Come, lift your eyes, your tiny scrap of mouth
So lightly mobile on your dim white face;
Aloofly talk of life, profound in youth

And simple also. Young and white and strange
You walk beside me down this shadowed street,
Against my hand your small breast softly lies,
And your laughter breaks the rhythm of our feet.

You are so young. And frankly you believe
This world, this darkened street, this shadowed wall
Are dim with beauty you passionately know
Cannot fade nor cool nor die at all.

[ 99 ]

Raise your hand, then, to your scarce seen face,
And draw the opaque curtains on your eyes;
Profoundly speak of life, of simple truths,
The while your voice is clear with frank surprise.

[ 100 ]

BOOKS AND THINGS
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER.

Linda Condon — Cytherea — The Bright Shawl.

No one since Poe has allowed himself to be enslaved
by words as has Hergesheimer. What was, in Poe, how-
ever, a morbid but masculine emotional curiosity has
degenerated with the age to a deliberate pandering to
the emotions in Hergesheimer, like an attenuation of
violins. A strange case of sex crucifixion turned backward
upon itself: Mirandola and Cardinal Bembo become ges-
tures in tinsel. He is subjective enough to bear life with
fair equanimity, but he is afraid of living, of man in his
sorry clay braving chance and circumstance.

He has never written a novel — someone has yet to coin
the word for each unit of his work — Linda Condon, in
which he reached his apex, is not a novel. It is more like
a lovely Byzantine frieze: a few unforgettable figures in
silent arrested motion, forever beyond the reach of time
and troubling the heart like music. His people are never
actuated from within; they do not create life about them;
they are like puppets assuming graceful but meaningless
postures in answer to the author's compulsions, and hold-

[ 101 1

ing these attitudes until he arranges their limbs again
in other gestures as graceful and as meaningless. His tact,
though, is delicate and flawless — always a social grace.
One can imagine Hergesheimer submerging himself in
Linda Condon as in a still harbor where the age cannot
hurt him and where rumor of the world reaches him only
as a far faint sound of rain. Perhaps he wrote the book
for this reason: surely a man of his delicacy and per-
ception would never suffer the delusion that Linda Con-
don is a novel.

For this reason the book troubles the heart, the
faintest shadow of an insistence; as though one were
waked from a dream, for a space into a quiet region of
light and shadow, soundless and beyond despair. La
figlia della sua mente, Famorosa l'idea.

Cytherea is nothing — the apostle James making an
obscene gesture. Rather, the apostle James trying to carry
off a top hat and a morning coat. A palpable and bootless
attempt to ape the literary colors of the day.

The Bright Shawl is better. The sublimated dime
novel peopled, like Cytherea, with morbid men and ob-
scene women. But skilful; the tricks of the trade were
never employed with better effect, unless by Conrad.
The induction to The Bright Shawl is good — he talks
of the shawl for a page or so before one is aware of the
presence of the shawl as a material object, before the
word itself is said; it is like being in a room full of people,
one of whom one has not yet directly looked at, though
conscious all the time of his presence.

These two books have swung to the opposite extreme

[ 102 ]

from Linda Condon. Hergesheimer has tried to enter
life, with disastrous results; Sinclair Lewis and the New
York Times have corrupted him. He should never try
to write about people at all; he should spend his time,
if he must write, describing trees or marble fountains,
houses or cities. Here his ability to write flawless prose
would not be tortured by his unfortunate reactions to
the apish imbecilities of the human race. As it is, he is
like an emasculate priest surrounded by the puppets he
has carved and clothed and painted — a terrific world
without motion or meaning.

W. F.

103

Appendix

On Criticism

By WILLIAM FAULKNER

Walt Whitman said, among bombast and muscle-
bound platitudes, that to have great poets there must be
great audiences too. If Walt Whitman realized this it
should be universally obvious in this day of radio to in-
form us and the so-called high-brow magazines to correct
our information; not to speak of the personal touch of
the lecture platform. And yet, what have the periodicals
and lecturers done to create either great audiences or
great writers of us? Do these Sybils take the neophyte
gently in hand and instruct him in the fundamentals of
taste? They do not even try to inculcate in him a rever-
ence for their mysteries, (thus robbing criticism of even
its emotional value — and how else are you to control
the herd, except through its emotions? Was there ever a
logical mob?). Thus there is no tradition, no esprit de
corps: All that is necessary for admission to the ranks
of criticism is a typewriter.

They do not even try to mould his opinions for him.
True, it is scarcely worth while moulding anyone's
opinions for him, but it is pleasant pastime changing his

[ 109 ]

opinion from one fallacy to another, for his soul's sake.
The American critic, like the prestidigitator, tries to find
just how much he can let the spectator see, and still get
away with it — the superiority of the hand over the eye.
He takes the piece under examination for an instrument
upon which to run difficult arpeggios of cleverness. This
seems so sophomoric, so useless; like the cornetist per-
forming aural acrobatics while waiting for the band to
assemble. With this difference: the cornetist gets tired
after a while, and stops. The amazing possibility here
occurs that the critic enjoys his own music. Do they, then
enjoy reading each other? One can as easily imagine
barbers shaving each other for fun.

The American critic blinds, not only his audience
but himself as well, to the prime essential. His trade be-
comes mental gymnastics: he becomes a reincarnation
of the side-show spell-binder of happy memory, holding
the yokelry enravished, not with what he says, but how
he says it. Their minds fly shut before the eye-filling
meretricity of pyrotechnics. Who has not heard this
conversation?

"Have you seen the last . . . (suit yourself)? Jones
Brown is good this time; he . . . uh, What is that book?
a novel, I think ... on the end of my tongue ... by
some fellow. Anyway, Jones refers to him as an aes-
thetic boy scout. It's good: you must read it."

"Yes, I will: Brown is always good, do you remember
what he said about someone: 'A parrot that couldn't fly
and had never learned to curse'?"

And yet, when you ask him the author's name, or the

[ no ]

book's, or what it is about, he cannot tell you! He either
has not read it, or has not only been unmoved by it but
has waited to read Brown to form an opinion. And
Brown has offered no opinion whatever. Perhaps Brown
himself has none.

How much better they do this sort of thing in Eng-
land than in America! Of course there are in America
critics as sane and tolerant and as soundly equipped, but
with a few exceptions they have no status: the magazines
which set the standard ignore them; or finding con-
ditions unbearable, they ignore the magazines and live
abroad. In a recent number of "The Saturday Review"
Mr. Gerald Gould, reviewing "The Hidden Player" by
Alfred Noyes, says:

"People do not talk like that ... It will not do to set
down ordinary speech of ordinary people; that would
generally be dull ... To give the deadly detail is
misleading." Here is the essential of criticism. So just
and clear and complete: there is nothing more to be
said. A criticism which not only the public, but the author
as well, may read with profit. But what American critic
would let it go at this? Who among our literary arbiters
could miss this chance of referring to Mr. Noyes as "an
aesthetic boy scout," or something else as sophomoric
and irrelevant? And what reader could then pick up
the book with an unbiased mind, without a faint un-
ease of patronage and pity . . . not for the book, but
for Mr. Noyes? One in a hundred. And what writer, with
his own compulsions to suffer, with his own urge to dis-
figure paper harrying him like a gad-fly, could get any

[ HI ]

profit or nourishment from being referred to as an aes-
thetic boy scout? Not one.

Saneness, that is the word. Live and let live; criticise
with taste for a criterion, and not tongue. The English re-
view criticises the book, the American the author. The
American critic foists upon the reading public a distorted
buffoon within whose shadow the titles of sundry uncut
volumes vaguely lurk. Surely, if there are two professions
in which there should be no professional jealousy, they
are prostitution and literature.

As it is, competition becomes cutthroat. The writer
cannot begin to compete with the critic, he is too busy
writing and also he is organically unfitted for the contest.
And if he had time and were properly armed, it would
be unfair. The critic, once he becomes a habit with his
readers, is considered infallible by them; and his contact
with them is direct enough to allow him always the last
word. And with the American the last word carries
weight, is culminative. Probably because it gives him a
chance to talk some himself.

[ 112 ]

Dying Gladiator

By WILLIAM FAULKNER

What sorrow, love, that the wind and the raining wake?
Man's life is but an April without a morrow
Between a snow and a season of snow. What sorrow
That winter again about his head must break?

Man's life is short, nor lingers. Gods!

What April knew thee, Caia, in thy young whiteness!

The shepherd lad of thee had a new lightness

To magic him, a clod among other clods.

This was youth, the world a star and a hill:
Rome but an echo, untroubled of us, the immortals;
Torches were less, and trumpets aloft in the portals
Ringing his blood to a flame, that it might spill.

What sorrow, love? Bronze in an age of bronze

And life is but the gesture of a caesar,

Death the mistress that dying, alone, could please her,

Dying, he may force her bastions.

Briefer, love, briefer than all the pain
Of April and youth, are garland and leaf and swallow.
What sorrow, love, that a field for a space lay fallow?
What sorrow, love, for drouth, after the rain?

[ 113 ]

Verse Old and Nascent:

A Pilgrimage
By WILLIAM FAULKNER

At the age of sixteen, I discovered Swinburne. Or
rather, Swinburne discovered me, springing from some
tortured undergrowth of my adolescence, like a highway-
man, making me his slave. My mental life at that period
was so completely and smoothly veneered with surface
insincerity — obviously necessary to me at that time, to
support intact my personal integrity — that I can not
tell to this day exactly to what depth he stirred me, just
how deeply the footprints of his passage are left in my
mind. It seems to me now that I found him nothing but
a flexible vessel into which I might put my own vague
emotional shapes without breaking them. It was years
later that I found in him much more than bright and
bitter sound, more than a satisfying tinsel of blood and
death and gold and the inevitable sea. True, I dipped
into Shelley and Keats — who doesn't, at that age? —
but they did not move me.

I do not think it was assurance so much, merely
complacence and a youthful morbidity, which counter-

[ 114 ]

acted them and left me cold. I was not interested in verse
for verse's sake then. I read and employed verse, firstly,
for the purpose of furthering various philanderings in
which I was engaged, secondly, to complete a youthful
gesture I was then making, of being "different" in a
small town. Later, my concupiscence waning, I turned
inevitably to verse, finding therein an emotional counter-
part far more satisfactory for two reasons: (1) No
partner was required (2) It was so much simpler just
to close a book, and take a walk. I do not mean by this
that I ever found anything sexual in Swinburne: there
is no sex in Swinburne. The mathematician, surely; and
eroticism just as there is eroticism in form and color and
movement wherever found. But not that tortured sex in
— say — D. H. Lawrence.

It is a time-honored custom to read Omar to one's
mistress as an accompaniment to consummation — a
sort of stringed obligato among the sighs. I found that
verse could be employed not only to temporarily blind the
spirit to the ungraceful posturings of the flesh, but also to
speed onward the whole affair. Ah, women, with their
hungry snatching little souls! With a man it is — quite
often — art for art's sake; with a woman it is always
art for the artist's sake.

Whatever it was that I found in Swinburne, it com-
pletely satisfied me and filled my inner life. I cannot
understand now how I could have regarded the others
with such dull complacency. Surely, if one be moved at
all by Swinburne he must inevitably find in Swinburne's
forerunners some kinship. Perhaps it is that Swinburne,

[ 115 ]

having taken his heritage and elaborated it to the despair
of any would-be poet, has coarsened it to tickle the dullest
of palates as well as the most discriminating, as used
water can be drunk by both hogs and gods.

Therefore, I believe I came as near as possible to ap-
proaching poetry with an unprejudiced mind. I was
subject to the usual proselyting of an older person, but
the strings were pulled so casually as scarcely to influence
my point of view. I had no opinions at that time, the
opinions I later formed were all factitious and were dis-
carded. I approached Poetry unawed, as if to say; "Now,
let's see what you have." Having used verse, I would now
allow verse to use me if it could.

When the co-ordinated chaos of the war was replaced
by the unco-ordinated chaos of peace I took seriously to
reading verse. With no background whatever I joined the
pack belling loudly after contemporary poets. I could
not always tell what it was all about but "This is the
stuff," I told myself, believing, like so many, that if one
cried loudly enough to be heard above the din, and so
convinced others that one was "in the know," one would
be automatically accoladed. I joined an emotional
B.P.O.E.

The beauty — spiritual and physical — of the South
lies in the fact that God has done so much for it and man
so little. I have this for which to thank whatever gods may
be: that having fixed my roots in this soil all contact,
saving by the printed word, with contemporary poets is
impossible.

That page is closed to me forever. I read Robinson

[ 116 ]

and Frost with pleasure, and Aldington; Conrad Aiken's
minor music still echoes in my heart; but beyond these,
that period might have never been. I no longer try to read
the others at all.

It was "The Shropshire Lad" which closed the period.
I found a paperbound copy in a bookshop and when I
opened it I discovered there the secret after which the
moderns course howling like curs on a cold trail in a
dark wood, giving off, it is true, an occasional note clear
with beauty, but curs just the same. Here was reason
for being born into a fantastic world: discovering the
splendor of fortitude, the beauty of being of the soil
like a tree about which fools might howl and which
winds of disillusion and death and despair might strip,
leaving it bleak, without bitterness; beautiful in sadness.

From this point the road is obvious, Shakespeare I
read, and Spenser, and the Elizabethans, and Shelley
and Keats. I read "Thou still unravished bride of quiet-
ness" and found a still water withal strong and potent,
quiet with its own strength, and satisfying as bread. That
beautiful awareness, so sure of its own power that it is
not necessary to create the illusion of force by frenzy
and motion. Take the odes to a nightingale, to a Grecian
urn, "Music to hear," etc.; here is the spiritual beauty
which the moderns strive vainly for with trickery, and
yet beneath it one knows are entrails; masculinity.

Occasionally I see modern verse in magazines. In four
years I have found but one cause of interest; a tendency
among them to revert to formal rhymes and conventional
forms again. Have they, too, seen the writing on the wall?

[ U7 ]

Can one still hope? Or is this age, this decade, impossible
for the creation of poetry? Is there nowhere among us
a Keats in embryo, someone who will tune his lute to
the beauty of the world? Life is not different from what
it was when Shelley drove like a swallow southward
from the unbearable English winter; living may be dif-
ferent, but not life. Time changes us, but Time's self
does not change. Here is the same air, the same sunlight
in which Shelley dreamed of golden men and women im-
mortal in a silver world and in which young John Keats
wrote "Endymion" trying to gain enough silver to marry
Fannie Brawne and set up an apothecary's shop. Is not
there among us someone who can write something
beautiful and passionate and sad instead of saddening?

[ 118 ]

The Faun

To H.L.
By WILLIAM FAULKNER

When laggard March, a faun whose stampings ring
And ripple the leaves with hiding: vain pursuit
Of May's anticipated dryad, mute
And yet unwombed of the moist flanks of spring;

Within the green dilemma of faint leaves

His panting puzzled heart is wrung and blind:

To run the singing corridors of wind,

Out-pace waned moons to May hand shapes and grieves;

Or, leafed close and passionate, to remain
And taste his bitter thumbs 'till May again
Left bare by wild vines' slipping, does incite
To strip the musiced leaves upon her breast
And from a cup unlipped, undreamt, unguessed,
Sip that wine sweet-sunned for Jove's delight.

[ 119 ]

[ 120 ]

Notes on the Text

In the following notes William Faulkner's drawings,
poems, and prose pieces which this volume reprints are
listed in the order of their first published appearance —
and therefore in the order of their appearance in this
volume as well. When this reprinting has altered the
original texts the alterations have been noted here.

Drawing of woman and bald man dancing: Ole Miss, 1916-1917,
Vol. XXI, p. 163, introducing a section of "Social Ac-
tivities."

Drawing of two men and a woman standing before a checker-
board background: Ole Miss, 1917-1918, Vol. XXII,
p. Ill, introducing a section of "Social Activities."

Drawing of woman and man standing before a background
lettered "Red and Blue": Ole Miss, 1917-1918, Vol.
XXII, p. 113, a page listing members of the Red and
Blue Club, a dancing society.

"L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune": The New Republic, Vol. XX (Au-
gust 6, 1919), p. 24. Later, in the University of Missis-
sippi newspaper, The Mississippian, on October 29, 1919,
page 4, Faulkner published the following, somewhat dif-
ferent, version of this poem, reproduced here verbatim:

[ 123 ]

L'Apres-Midi D'un Faune

I follow through the singing trees
Her streaming clouded hair and face
And lascivious dreaming knees
Like gleaming water from some place
Of sleeping streams, or autumn leaves
Slow shed through still love wearied air.
She pauses; and as one who grieves,
Shakes down her blown and vagrant hair
To veil her face, but not her eyes —
A hot quick spark, each sudden glance,
Or as the wild brown bee that flies
Sweet winged, a sharp extravagance
Of kisses on my limbs and neck.
She whirls and dances through the trees
That lift and sway like arms and fleck
Her with quick shadows, and the breeze
Lies on her short and circled breast.
Now hand in hand with her I go.
The green night in the silver west
Of virgin stars, pale row on row
Like ghostly hands, and ere she sleep
The dusk will take her by some stream
In silent meadows, dim and deep —
In dreams of stars and dreaming dream.

I have a sudden wish to go

To some far silent midnight moon,

Where lonely streams whisper and flow

And sigh on sands blanched by the moon.

And blond limbed dancers whirling past

The senile worn moon staring through

The sighing trees, until at last

Their hair is powdered bright with dew.

And their sad slow limbs and brows

Are petals drifting with the breeze,

Shed from the fingers of the boughs;

Then suddenly, on all of these

A sound, like some great deep bell stroke

[ 124 ]

Falls, and they dance, unclad and cold —
It was the earth's great heart that broke
For springlbroke before the world grew old.

William Faulkner of University
of Mississippi. From the New
Republic, Aug. 6, 1919.

"CATHAY.": The Mississippian, November 12, 1919, p. 8. This
poem was especially badly set in The Mississippian.
Part of the emendation here derives not only from an
attempt to estimate what alterations are logical but
from examination of the three other versions of the poem
mentioned in the introduction to this volume.

Line 1 : The Mississippian printed only the first of the two

commas in this line.
Line 3: "foretells" appeared in The Mississippian as "for-

tells."
Line 6: The Mississippian ended this line with a semicolon.
Line 14: The Mississippian indented this line.
Line 15: "spawn" appeared in The Mississippian as "span."
Line 17: The Mississippian printed "thee" as "the" and made

"nor will" into a two-word succeeding line.

"LANDING IN LUCK.": The Mississippian, November 26,

1919, pp. 2 and 7. This story appeared in a column

headed "WEEKLY SHORT STORY Edited by Professor

Erwin."

Paragraph 3, sentence 1 : "barracks" appeared as "barrack's."

Paragraph 6, sentence 2: "climbed" appeared as "climed."

Paragraph 7, sentence 9: "devilish" appeared as "devilsh."

Paragraph 8, sentence 1: "A silence hung" appeared as "A

silence that hung."
Paragraph 9, sentence 4: "it's your neck" appeared as "its

your neck."
Paragraph 11, sentence 2: "He gained speed" appeared as

"He gained sped."
Paragraph 11, sentence 3: "though he had taken" appeared
as "thought he had taken."

[ 125 ]

Paragraph 15, sentence 1: the original omitted the quota-
tion marks before "thinks."

Paragraph 16, sentence 2: "edge" appeared as "elge."

Paragraph 18, sentence 3: Though the question mark end-
ing this sentence could have been a typographical error in
the original, it has been retained here.

Paragraph 18, sentence 15: "followed cautiously by" ap-
peared as "following cautiously by," which idiom and para-
graph 25 indicate is a typographical error; and "dogs meet-
ing" appeared originally as "dogs meetin."

Paragraph 19, sentence 1: "CO." appeared as "CO"; and
"three lesser lights" appeared as "thre lesser lights."

Paragraph 20: in the original a comma immediately followed
the question mark.

Paragraph 21, sentence 1: "'ere, sir" appeared as "'ere
sir."

Paragraph 23, sentence 1: the quotation marks preceding this
sentence did not appear in the original.

Paragraph 28, sentence 1: the third set of quotation marks,
being reversed in the original, erroneously closed a quota-
tion instead of opening one.

Paragraph 33, sentence 1: the second set of quotation marks,
being reversed in the original, erroneously opened a quo-
tation instead of closing one.

Paragraph 35, sentence 1: the end of this sentence appeared
without the question mark and closing quotation marks.

Paragraph 36, sentence 1: "he stared into" appeared as "he
satred into."

Paragraph 36, sentences 2, 3, 4, and 5: Because the only
available original text lacks the top of parts of these lines
of type, this volume prints some of these letters without
much textual justification and the quotation marks and the
apostrophe without any textual justification whatever.

Paragraph 36, sentence 4: "N.CO.'s" appeared as "N.CO's."

Paragraph 39, sentence 4: "he was all staring eyes" appeared
as "he was al lstaring eyes."

Paragraph 42, sentence 2: in the original this sentence did
not begin with quotation marks.

Paragraph 50: in the original this sentence did not begin with
quotation marks.

[ 126 ]

Paragraph 52, sentence 4: "You're" appeared as "Your'e."

Paragraph 52, sentence 5: "Why, I got" appeared as "Why I
got."

Paragraph 54, sentence 1 : the second set of quotation marks,
being reversed in the original, erroneously opened a quota-
tion instead of closing one.

Paragraph 55, sentence 5: double quotation marks appeared
in the original before and after the letter "f."

"SAPPHICS.": The Mississippian, November 26, 1919, p. 3.

Line 4: the period which ends this line is an emendation, per-
haps improper, of the comma which ended this line in The
Mississippian.

Line 8: the comma which ends this line is an emendation,
perhaps improper, of the period which ended this line in
The Mississippian.

Line 23: "Lethean" appeared as "Lethan."

"AFTER FIFTY YEARS.": The Mississippian, December 10,
1919, p. 4.
Line 2: this reprinting, perhaps improperly, omits the period
with which The Mississippian ended this line.

"UNE BALLADE DES FEMMES PERDUES": The Mississip-
pian, January 28, 1920, p. 3.
Title: because of typographical error, this title appeared as

"UNE BALAD HEDES FEMMES PERDUES" in The

Mississippian.
The quotation from Villon: this appeared as "'Mais ou sont

les nieges d' antan' " in The Mississippian.
Line 4: The Mississippian printed " — Ca ne fait rein! Helas"

as the first part of this line.
Line 6: in a holograph version of this poem dated January 1,

1920, in a decorated gift booklet, Faulkner hyphenated

"lute strings" in line 6, "boarding school" in line 7, "love

songs" in line 10, and "star dust" in line 20.
Line 9: "Amorous" appeared as "Amourous."

"NAIADS' SONG.": The Mississippian, February 4, 1920, p. 3.
Line 14: "there" appeared as "here."

[ 127 ]

Line 44: "glides he in forgetful ness" appeared as "glides he
is forgetfulness."

"FANTOCHES.": The Mississippian, February 25, 1920, p. 3.

Title: in The Mississippian, presumably through typographical
error, this title appeared as "FANTOUCHES."; because no
such word seems to exist, this reprinting has changed the
spelling to that of Verlaine's title.

"a Paul Verlaine.": the printer of The Mississippian, following
his practice of using no accents, printed "a Paul Verlaine."
here.

Line 1 : this reprinting, perhaps improperly, retains The
Mississippian spelling of "Scaramouches" and "Pucinella"
on the ground that, though in Verlaine's poem, "Fantoches,"
the first line ("Scaramouche et Pulcinella,") uses the tra-
ditional spellings, Faulkner, who presumably changed one
of these two traditional male figures into a woman, just pos-
sibly may have deliberately changed the traditional spelling
of their names also.

Line 4: this reprinting, perhaps improperly, retains The
Mississippian text's "of Bogona" on the ground that though
"of Bologna" is the translation of Verlaine's "Bolonais"
Faulkner may have altered this name deliberately just as
he may have altered the poem's two other proper names
(see note next above).

Line 5: "skull cap" appeared as "skull cup."

Line 6: "eye" appeared as "eyes."

Line 12: "garde" appeared as "grade."

"CLAIR DE LUNE.": The Mississippian, March 3, 1920, p. 6.

Line 4: "fanchise," which appeared in The Mississippian, is
presumably a typographical error; if so, Faulkner may have
written "franchise." But "franchise" fails to fit his other-
wise rather regular rhyme scheme. Perhaps the reader
would prefer to substitute here some such word as "fantasy."

Line 6: "conqueror" appeared as "conquerer."

"STREETS.": The Mississippian, March 17, 1920, p. 2.

Line 1 : though The Mississippian ended the exclamation in
this line and lines 13 and 17 with periods, it seems reason-

[ 128 ]

able to assume that the periods are typographical errors and
should be replaced by exclamation points like those which
end this same exclamation in lines 5 and 9 as well as in all
its five appearances in Verlaine's poem.
Line 12: The Mississippian ended this line with a period which,
correctly or not, is omitted in this reprinting on the assump-
tion that it is a typographical error because all other lines in
the poem except the five repetitions of the exclamation end
without punctuation though some of them call for punctu-
ation as much — or as little — as this line does.

"A POPLAR.": The Mississippian, March 17, 1920, p. 7.
Line 8: "ecstatic" appeared as "extatic."

"A CLYMENE.": The Mississippian, April 14, 1920, p. 3.

Title: following its practice of using no accents, The Mississip-
pian printed this as "A CLYMENE."

"STUDY.": The Mississippian, April 21, 1920, p. 4.
Line 16: "silver" appeared as "silvtr."

"ALMA MATER.": The Mississippian, May 12, 1920, p. 3.
Line 14: in the original this line did not end with a period.

Drawing of four men facing the reader above the caption
"CLASSES": Ole Miss, 1919-1920, Vol. XXIV, p. 29.
Though this drawing is unsigned it is in the style charac-
teristic of the four drawings Faulkner did sign in this vol-
ume of the annual.

Drawing of woman and man in high wind beneath the caption
"Organizations": Ole Miss, 1919-1920, Vol. XXIV, p.
105.

Drawing of woman and army officer: Ole Miss, 1919-1920, Vol.
XXIV, p. 145, on a page listing members of the A.E.F.
Club.

Drawing of two men and a woman before candelabra beneath

[ 129 1

the caption "Social Activities": Ole Miss, 1919-1920,
Vol. XXIV, p. 155.

Drawing of woman and man dancing beside the caption "Red
& Blue": Ole Miss, 1919-1920, Vol. XXIV, p. 157, on
a page listing members of the Red and Blue Club, a
dancing society.

"To a Co-ed": Ole Miss, 1919-1920, Vol. XXIV, p. 174.
Line 4: the original did not end this line with a period.

"BOOKS AND THINGS" [review of W. A. Percy, In April
Once]: The Mississippian, November 10, 1920, p. 5.

Paragraph 2, sentence 1 : "Mississippian, a graduate" ap-
peared as "Mississippian a graduate."

Paragraphs 2 and 3: The Mississippian, printing several lines
of type out of their proper order, put parts of each of
these paragraphs in the other. The lines have been un-
scrambled here.

Paragraph 3, sentence 3: "His muse" appeared as "His His
muse"; and "ecstasies" appeared as "ecstacies."

Paragraph 3, line 3 of the poem by Percy: The Mississip-
pian did not end this line with Percy's comma.

Paragraph 3, line 8 of the poem by Percy: The Mississip-
pian did not follow "alone" with Percy's comma.

"BOOKS & THINGS" [review of Conrad Aiken, Turns and
Movies]: The Mississippian, February 16, 1921, p. 5.
The excerpt from Aiken's "Discordants": in The Mississippian,
the fifth line did not end with Aiken's comma and in the
seventh line his "beloved" appeared as "beloved."

"CO-EDUCATION AT OLE MISS.": The Mississippian, May
4, 1921, p. 5.
Line 9: "lov'st" appeared as "love'st."

Drawing of sailor, soldier, and airman above the caption "FISH,
FLESH, FOWL": Ole Miss, 1920-1921, Vol. XXV, p.
129, on a page listing members of the University's post
of the American Legion.

[ 130 ]

Drawing of non-commissioned officer and four commissioned
officers under the caption "A.E.F. CLUB": Ole Miss,
1920-1921, Vol. XXV, p. 131.

Decorative border and the caption "MARIONETTES": Ole
Miss, 1920-1921, Vol. XXV, p. 135, on a page listing
members of The Marionettes, a drama society. Though
this drawing is unsigned it is in Faulkner's characteristic
style.

Drawing of man and woman dancing before jazz orchestra:
Ole Miss, 1920-1921, Vol. XXV, p. 137, on a page list-
ing the members of the Red and Blue Club, a dancing
society.

"NOCTURNE.": and decorative border: Ole Miss, 1920-1921,
Vol. XXV, pp. 214-215. In Ole Miss the plates appeared
in inverted order. Though this poem and drawing are un-
signed they are in Faulkner's characteristic lettering and
style.

"BOOKS & THINGS" [review of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aria
da Capo]: The Mississippian, January 13, 1922, p. 5.

"BOOKS & THINGS: AMERICAN DRAMA: EUGENE
O'NEILL.": The Mississippian, February 3, 1922, p. 5.
Paragraph 1, sentence 2: "Rhone valley in the nineteenth
century" appeared as "Rhone valley in the eighteenth cen-
tury."
Paragraph 5, sentence 3: the quotation marks before the title
"Gold" appeared as a single quotation mark.

"THE HILL": The Mississippian, March 10, 1922, pp. 1 and 2.
Paragraph 1, sentence 2: "invisibility" appeared as "invis-

ability."
Paragraph 2: the end of this paragraph appeared without a

period.
Paragraph 3, sentence 2: "simplicity of the court house

columns was discolored" appeared as "simplicity of the

court house columns were discolored."

[ 131 ]

Paragraph 4, sentence 3: "the tieless casual" appeared as
"the Tieless casual."

Initials at the conclusion: though the original was without
these initials, the next issue of The Mississippian (March
17, 1922, p. 5) printed this statement: "Correction: Through
some error the initials 'W.F.' were omitted from the sketch
entitled The Hill' which appeared in the last issue of The
Mississippian. We hereby mak [sic] amends."

"BOOKS & THINGS: American Drama: inhibitions": The Mis-
sissippian, March 17, 1922, p. 5; and March 24, 1922,
p. 5.
Section 1, paragraph 1, sentence 1: "twenty-five" appeared

as "twenty five."
Section 1, paragraph 1, sentence 2: "to Frank Crane's market"

appeared as "to Frank Crane market," and "stratum" ap-
peared as "strata."
Section 1, paragraph 2, sentence 3: "Kreymborg" appeared

as "Kreyemborg."
Section 2, paragraph 2, sentence 3: "literary shibboleths and

pogroms" appeared as "literary shibboleth and pogroms,"

with extra space after "shibboleth."
Section 2, paragraph 2: the March 17 installment ended

with this paragraph.
Section 2, paragraph 3, sentence 5: ended in the original

without a period.

Drawing of woman and man at rail of ship: Ole Miss, 1922,
Vol. XXVI, p. 188, on a page listing the members of the
French Club. Though this drawing and joke are unsigned
they are in Faulkner's characteristic lettering and style.

"Portrait": Double Dealer (New Orleans), Vol. Ill (June, 1922),
p. 337.

"BOOKS AND THINGS" [review of Joseph Hergesheimer,

Linda Condon, Cytherea, and The Bright Shawl]: The

Mississippian, December 15, 1922, p. 5.

Paragraph 2, sentence 3: "graceful" appeared as "fraceful."

Paragraph 3, sentence 2: "La figlia" appeared as "La figlio."

[ 132 ]

Paragraph 5, sentence 3: "skilful" appeared as "skilfull."

Drawing of three women boarding a streetcar while two men
watch: The Scream, May, 1925, Vol. I, No. 5, p. 11.
Later the plate was cut in two and used again, in The
Scream, May, 1927, Vol. Ill, No. 8, where the section
showing the three women appears on p. 12 and the
section showing the two men appears on p. 14.

Drawing of one man supporting another before a statue: The
Scream, May, 1925, Vol. I, No. 5, p. 14.

Drawing of two men and an automobile: The Scream, May,
1925, Vol. I, No. 5, p. 15.

"On Criticism": Double Dealer, Vol. VII (January-February,
1925), pp. 83-84.
Paragraph 1, sentence 6: "esprit de corps" appeared as

"espirt-du-corps."
Paragraph 4, sentence 4: "It's" appeared as "Its."
Paragraph 10, sentence 4: "enough" appeared as "enought."

"Dying Gladiator": Double Dealer, Vol. VII (January-February,
1925), p. 85.

"Verse Old And Nascent: A Pilgrimage": Double Dealer, Vol.
VII (April, 1925), pp. 129-131.
Paragraph 4, sentence 4: "discriminating" appeared as "dis-

ciminating."
Paragraph 10, sentence 1: "Spenser" appeared as "Spencer."
Paragraph 10, sentence 4: "nightingale" appeared as "Night-
ingale."
Paragraph 11, sentence 9: "Shelley" appeared as "Shelly."

"The Faun": Double Dealer, Vol. VII (April, 1925), p. 148.
Line 13: "undreamt" appeared as "undreampt."

[ 133 ]

Drawing of an aviator hanging to an airplane by one hand:
The Scream, 1925, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 12. This unsigned
drawing, judging by its style and the styles of the draw-
ings signed by other contributors to The Scream, possibly
is by William Faulkner.

[ 134 ]

Due

Date
Returned

Due
Due

Returned

t A

V 0 2 2004

William Faulkner: early prose main
8l8.5F263wC5

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